Data Labels

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