Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Preview
Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video
Over view of the Data Label chart element.
Example Excel Spreadsheet
Adding data labels to your chart
adds the actual underlying
0:00
data of your chart to the plot area.
0:05
Let's see what happens
with our gym member chart.
0:08
So you can see here,
if I add it to the center, it'd be there.
0:13
I can left, right, above, bellow,
really whatever you wanna do here.
0:16
I wanna do above.
0:23
This doesn't really look very good for
this specific chart, but
0:25
it can be helpful in some situations.
0:28
Let's look at a different spreadsheet
showing components of the cost of goods
0:31
sold, known as COGS, by a fictional
company over a three year period.
0:34
So here we are looking at the COGS.
0:40
Let's make a stacked column chart.
0:45
Well, that's wrong,
that's showing the series inverse.
0:50
There's three years and
five line items of COGS.
0:54
I don't wanna see the five
line items of COGS by year.
0:57
So I'm going to right click on the chart,
click Select Data, and
1:00
I'm going to switch column and row.
1:04
So, We have an extra data series
1:10
here that I think I just added by
accident, so let's get rid of that.
1:15
Okay.
1:22
And let's add some data
labels to the center.
1:26
So here having the data labels
helps the audience understand
1:31
the relative value of
each component of COGS.
1:36
And affords them the opportunity to
actually do calculations with the data
1:39
in the graph if they want to.
1:43
Because the time period and
number of series is smaller,
1:46
the labels don't clutter the chart
area like it did in the other example.
1:50
It is sort of cluttered up here, and
1:55
we can delete those cuz
they're relatively small.
1:57
I just clicked on that one point.
2:00
Another thing to note is that here,
the labels
2:03
are maybe a little bit difficult to read
cuz the background color is a bit darker.
2:07
You can change those and
format the data label,
2:12
the Text Options > Text Fill,
and I want it to be white.
2:17
So that makes it easier to read.
2:27
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign up