Adding data labels to your chart adds the actual underlying

data of your chart to the plot area.

Let's see what happens with our gym member chart.

So you can see here, if I add it to the center, it'd be there.

I can left, right, above, bellow, really whatever you wanna do here.

I wanna do above.

This doesn't really look very good for this specific chart, but

it can be helpful in some situations.

Let's look at a different spreadsheet showing components of the cost of goods

sold, known as COGS, by a fictional company over a three year period.

So here we are looking at the COGS.

Let's make a stacked column chart.

Well, that's wrong, that's showing the series inverse.

There's three years and five line items of COGS.

I don't wanna see the five line items of COGS by year.

So I'm going to right click on the chart, click Select Data, and

I'm going to switch column and row.

So, We have an extra data series

here that I think I just added by accident, so let's get rid of that.

Okay.

And let's add some data labels to the center.

So here having the data labels helps the audience understand

the relative value of each component of COGS.

And affords them the opportunity to actually do calculations with the data

in the graph if they want to.

Because the time period and number of series is smaller,

the labels don't clutter the chart area like it did in the other example.

It is sort of cluttered up here, and

we can delete those cuz they're relatively small.

I just clicked on that one point.

Another thing to note is that here, the labels

are maybe a little bit difficult to read cuz the background color is a bit darker.

You can change those and format the data label,

the Text Options > Text Fill, and I want it to be white.

So that makes it easier to read.