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Over view of the Data Label chart element.
Example Excel Spreadsheet
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Adding data labels to your chart adds the actual underlying
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data of your chart to the plot area.
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Let's see what happens with our gym member chart.
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So you can see here, if I add it to the center, it'd be there.
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I can left, right, above, bellow, really whatever you wanna do here.
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I wanna do above.
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This doesn't really look very good for this specific chart, but
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it can be helpful in some situations.
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Let's look at a different spreadsheet showing components of the cost of goods
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sold, known as COGS, by a fictional company over a three year period.
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So here we are looking at the COGS.
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Let's make a stacked column chart.
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Well, that's wrong, that's showing the series inverse.
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There's three years and five line items of COGS.
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I don't wanna see the five line items of COGS by year.
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So I'm going to right click on the chart, click Select Data, and
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I'm going to switch column and row.
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So, We have an extra data series
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here that I think I just added by accident, so let's get rid of that.
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Okay.
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And let's add some data labels to the center.
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So here having the data labels helps the audience understand
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the relative value of each component of COGS.
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And affords them the opportunity to actually do calculations with the data
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in the graph if they want to.
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Because the time period and number of series is smaller,
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the labels don't clutter the chart area like it did in the other example.
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It is sort of cluttered up here, and
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we can delete those cuz they're relatively small.
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I just clicked on that one point.
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Another thing to note is that here, the labels
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are maybe a little bit difficult to read cuz the background color is a bit darker.
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You can change those and format the data label,
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the Text Options > Text Fill, and I want it to be white.
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So that makes it easier to read.
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