Imagine that you create a lot of charts in Excel and that you have some personal, custom settings that you like to apply over and over again. Things like having the title in a specific font and in a specific location, you always use a certain colour for the bars and another colour for the background, you like to have Data Labels and no Gridlines. That sort of thing.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a template with all those settings already there and with a couple of clicks apply them to an existing chart? That’s what Chart Templates are for.
Overview
To create a chart template…
- Create a chart
- Apply the desired settings
- Right click on the chart
- Select Save as Template and assign filename
To attach a template to a chart…
- Select the chart you want to attach the template to
- Select Chart Design on the Ribbon
- Click Change Chart Type
- Click Templates and select the name of the template
Chart templates work in Excel on both Windows and Mac. One big difference is that on Windows you can create a new chart from a template but on the Mac this feature isn’t available so you’ll need to create a default chart and then apply a template to it.
If you want to see the detail rather than relying on the above brief step-by-step overview, check out the video below…
Download a copy of the files used in this video: https://share.zight.com/E0uNmWQ7