Excel - Changing design of bars in charts - excel

In excel charts can we change design of bars from
to
Background: I have taken agile project plan excel template from https://www.smartsheet.com/agile-project-management-excel-templates, but I didnt like the bars without arrows and hence I want to change these bars to look something like bars in https://www.smartsheet.com/agile-project-management-excel-templates#agile-product-roadmap-template
Lead here is appreciated.

Half... Let me show and you decide :)
This arrow is not a chart object. It's a shape, a drawing:
However, we can use shape object in Excel charts.
Remove text (you'll see in the last picture why) and Copy the excel object (picture above).
Mark the chart series you want to replace (notice I marked all of them, small circles)
Then just paste :D!!
Notice one bar has a border line, just click on the bar -> "Fill & Line" -> "Border" -> "No Line" to hide the border line around your shape object.
You can do it individually with different colours. When the graph changes the size of your bars changes too (according to your data). It's a bit more "maintenance" but looks better. General rule, the better it looks, the more "special" it is (more manual involvement)...

Related

Excel - Change bar graph to all same colour

I have a bar graph as seen below, I need to change the colour of all the bars to let's say green.
Currently the only way I have been able to find to do this is click each individual date and then the fill bucket green as excel doesn't allow you to CTRL + Click multiple elements. Is there a way to change the colour of all the bars shown in one go?
Worth mentioning I can not change the colours by creating a "values table" as the workbook is locked and I have to do this for several different graphs.
That's happening because you have created the chart using every date as an individual serie. I suggest to use the "Switch Row/Column" option and became all the dates as a unique serie, so all the bars will have the same color.
In the other hand if you need to keep the chart as you shown on the picture shared, is possible to change every bar at once but just using a VBA code.

Integrating charts in Excel

I was wondering if there is a way to integrate a bar chart and a line chart into "one single chart", where the bars are "on top of the line plot? See picture for a clearer view.
(Obviously the bar-chart is not supposed to be outside the actual plot...)
This is a bit of a hack, but you could create two charts with the chart area fill transparency turned to 100%. This allows charts to be placed on top of each other, but in a way that both can be seen. Turning off any elements in the chart that you don't want (for example, duplicate axis) would enhance the presentation.
Problem solved. It was actually just a matter of scaling data, and using two "line with markers" type charts. The lines in between each dot in the one showing the percentage, were then removed. Then, using a certain layout, a line connecting the two series could appear (as shown in pic).

How to extract each color bar and copy them in a table?

I made a diagram to show unique columns with several colors in each, as shown in the picture.
I have hundreds of that to make and I have no idea about how to do that.
I would like to know if it's possible to extract each color bar separately and copy them under "Icons". I am not sure if the word "extract" is the correct term, but I would like to display a raw-image of that color bar.
Maybe a formula?
I am able to use Office Excel and Libreoffice Calc.
Thank you so much.
These are instructions to do this manually, but this would be an ideal project to apply VBA and automate these tasks.
The idea is to create each category of stacked bar as its own individual chart, which can then be exported or copied to an image file.
This is based on the "spark lines" concept, which is small, eye-catching graphics embedded within the text of a document, as opposed to large graphics. MS added some sparklines functionality in recent versions of Office apps, and although MS "spark lines" doesn't support stacked bar chart type, the same thing can still be accomplished with a little work.
Step 1: Select one row of the data and do Insert Chart, stacked bar.
Step 2: Select data and Switch Rows & Columns.
Step 3: Delete the gridlines, axes, chart border, etc., .
Step 4: Expand the Plot Area so that it covers the entire Chart Area, and format the data series to 0% gap width.
Step 5: Apply your colors to each point in the series.
Step 6: Resize the chart to fit on a cell.
Finally now that you have created some ChartObjects you can manipulate them. ChartObjects can be Exported as image files, or copy/paste-special as images, bmp, or enhanced metafiles, etc.

excel exporting to pdf; graph placement offset

I have some trouble with a document when exporting it to pdf with the builtin pdf export function of excel (2010).
I've generated a graph on my worksheet, with some colored cells arround it. Visually it looks good (even if I zoom on it with the ctrl key + mouse wheel). But when exporting, the graph overlap the surrounding cells.
For example, on the image bellow, I take a screenshot of my graph in excel (at top) and in pdf (at bottom). The red part is my graph (I've colored the background of the graph object). The graph have a black border. And just on the top of the graph, I've colored the background of a cell in blue. Normally, the graph must not overlap the blue cell, because I've manually place it bellow (cut the graph, select the cell bellow the blue one, and past the graph to this emplacement).
But we can see that:
the black border overlap the blue cell (in excel and in pdf version; but it's not really my problem; I've understand that the border in excel object is at outside the object; and then overlapp surround objects/cells).
the graph (in red + the border) has not the same place in excel and in pdf, there is a big offset (it's not a resize problem, this offset is present and the left side too). The place of the graph is more on the left and more on the top in pdf version than it can be!
(I'm using this to automatically generate reports; and the result is not visually good)
Is there any way to overcome this problem?
Hmm, I can't replicate your problem, but I've had similar issues exporting Crystal Reports to PDF. Here's 2 suggestions, neither of which is perfect and I couldn't try them first (again, sorry I couldn't replicate the problem):
Add a white row with a very small height between the graph and the cell. It might even be visually more appealing than the 2 objects one on top of the other.
Make your graph's background transparent and hide the border. Maybe add some extra white space at the top of your graph. That way, they'll still overlap, but it won't be as obvious.

Why is Autofit Labeling greyed out?

I Have created a bar chart in a 2007 .xls file, but the data labels cannot be resized. When you go to the "format Data Labels" and then click on alignment, the Autofit and Internal Margin option is grayed out. Anyone know why?
Short version: It is greyed out for chart text, because it the option doesn’t apply.
Long version:
This is because on a chart, chart text do need to use margins, rather you can you can just move the text., and set its X and Y position. For example take the Chart Title, if you want more space to the left, just click and drag the title to the right. If you want the chart title to be bigger you just set a larger font, you have complete control over the title, as well as all other text on that chart, axis titles, legends, data labels, etc.
Internal margins are meant to be used when you don’t have complete control take for example text in a shape. If you insert a shape in your workbook, and add text to it, you cannot just pick the text up and move it to the right if you want more space on the left, so you can set the margin.
Here's a trick that worked for me:
My problem was: I added more text to the axis title and it was too long for it's original shape so some text went into second line.
My solution: I type the complete text somewhere else, copy the text, double click on the axis title and delete the original text -- the cursor would still be there -- now insert the copied text. Done! They are all in one line!
Partial solution to resize label to a single line: Data labels in a chart will often wrap themselves, when you dont want them to. They would often seem better in a vertical single line above the graph item. Reset them to one single line by editing the text in the label, deleting the Excel imposed return, and replace it with a space. The line, and label box, will resize to fit a single line. However because you have "manually interfered with the lable, it will no longer update for changing graph data. You would have to double click each lable then reset it. Most annoying.
A way around it is to make the chart area big. The data label boxes will resize to fit the words in one line. Then make the chart small (not the chart area).
Manually insert a textbox into the bar chart and type in the label that way. It's annoying and labor-intensive, but it works.

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