How to change the area within a chart to display different colours and other adjustments.
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Chart Area Customisation
Let’s now go through each component of a chart and just see what can and can’t be done with it. You’ll notice as you hover over a chart – as you go over certain areas, it will hover, and say, for example, Chart Title, Chart Area, Vertical Grid lines, etc – so this will explain what you are currently looking at. And remember through the Chart Tools, under Layout, you can access all these areas in this drop down. But the easiest way often is just to click on the relevant area here.
So let’s start with Chart Area customisation. If we right click on the Chart Area, towards the bottom you will see something called Format Chart Area. If I click on it, I get a number of options. I’ll just move this out the way. At the moment you’ll see the Fill option is Automatic – but we can specify. We can say No Fill and you’ll see what has happened – it is transparent – you can see the grid lines behind. Maybe we want a Solid Fill – you’ll see then you have a choice of all the various colours and the transparencies. Maybe you want a Gradient Fill so, basically, you can see it gets darker then lighter. So you can change all of these options. A picture or text Fill – you can add a text here or one of your own pictures – perhaps the logo. Every possible component of it is customizable. If I go to Automatic, you’ll see we are back to where we were. So that’s the Fill.
The border colours – a similar concept – these are the borders – No line and you’ll see that line has disappeared. Maybe a solid line – what colour? And you can choose whatever colour you want – if I chose that – you’ll see we have got a red line. Gradient line – maybe you want to add some sort of gradient to it. Back to Automatic – that is the standard one we will use.
Looking at Border Styles – how wide do you want the border to be? So we’ll go and let’s make it a really thick border. What is your compound type – is there a dash – maybe there is a dash you want to include – let’s try that one for example. You can see what we are doing here. You can see we can change how the corners go round – how do the joins work. If there are arrows – what type of arrows do you want to do? You’ll see here we have also got rounded corners – if I click that on, you’ll see the corners become a little more rounded. So these are a variety of options that exist for the Border Styles.
You’ll see we have also got Shadow Options – so how do you want the shadows to appear? Depending what you click, you will see various shadows. What Colour, Transparency, Angle, Blur, Distance. All these options are customizable.
And the last one under Chart Area is the 3D format and you’ll see you have a variety of choices which you can use.