How to Add Chart Style in Microsoft Excel

Transforming a dense spreadsheet into an insightful chart feels great, but a default, unstyled Excel chart can still be hard to read. A little bit of styling can turn a confusing graph into a clear, professional visual that tells your data’s story at a glance. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about adding and customizing chart styles in Microsoft Excel, from the quickest presets to detailed manual formatting.

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Why Chart Styles Matter

Before we jump into the "how," let's quickly touch on the "why." Effective chart styling isn't just about making your report look pretty. It serves several crucial functions:

• Improves Readability: Thoughtful use of colors, fonts, and spacing makes it easier for your audience to read and understand the information.
• Highlights Key Insights: You can use style to draw attention to the most important data points, such as the highest-performing month or an outlier that needs investigation.
• Adds Professionalism: A well-styled chart looks polished and shows that you’ve put care into your analysis, building trust with your audience.
• Reinforces Branding: Using brand colors and fonts creates a consistent look and feel across all your reports and presentations.

Think about a default blue bar chart versus one with clear labels, intentional colors, and a clean background. The difference is night and day - one is just data, while the other is an insight.

The Quick and Easy Way: Excel's Preset Chart Styles

If you need a better-looking chart in under 30 seconds, Excel's built-in styles are your best friend. They offer a variety of pre-packaged designs that apply color schemes, borders, shadows, and other effects with a single click.

Here’s how to use them:

1. First, create your chart. If you don't have one yet, just select your data range, go to the Insert tab, and choose one from the Charts section.
2. Click on your chart to select it. When you do, two new contextual tabs will appear on the ribbon: Chart Design and Format.
3. Click on the Chart Design tab. You'll see a gallery labeled Chart Styles.
4. Hover your cursor over the different styles in the gallery. Excel will give you a live preview of how each style will look on your chart.
5. When you find one you like, simply click it to apply it.

The styles are simple but effective. Some add a dark background for strong contrast, others add subtle gradients to the bars or lines, and many adjust the gridlines and font weights to improve visual structure. It’s the fastest way to upgrade from the default look.

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Beyond the Default: Customizing Chart Colors

The preset styles are great, but what if the layout is perfect, but the colors don't fit your company's branding? Or maybe you just have a different color scheme in mind. Excel makes this easy to change, too.

Instead of manually changing every bar or line, you can apply a completely new color palette to your entire chart.

1. Select your chart to bring up the Chart Design tab.
2. Right next to the Chart Styles gallery, you’ll find a button called Change Colors.
3. Clicking this button reveals a dropdown menu with a range of color palettes.

You'll see two primary categories here:

• Colorful: These palettes use a collection of different colors that are designed to work well together. Each data series will be assigned a different color from the palette.
• Monochromatic: These palettes use various shades and tints of a single color. This is excellent for creating a clean, sophisticated look when you want to show progression or variation without introducing distracting colors.

Pro-Tip: The colors available in this menu are based on your workbook's Theme. To create a completely custom branded palette, go to the Page Layout tab, click Colors, and select Customize Colors. Here, you can define your brand’s primary and secondary colors. Once saved, this new theme will appear as an option in the "Change Colors" dropdown for all your charts.

Taking Control: Manually Formatting Chart Elements

For complete creative control, you need to go beyond presets and format individual chart elements. Nearly every part of a chart can be edited - from the bars and lines themselves to the title, axes, background, and gridlines. Your command center for this work is the Format Pane.

To open it, simply double-click any element on the chart, or right-click an element and choose Format [Element Name].... For example, right-click a bar in a bar chart and select "Format Data Series..." A panel will appear on the right side of your screen with all the available customization options.

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Styling the Data Series (Bars, Lines, or Slices)

This is where you format the visual representation of your actual data.

• Fill: Click the paint bucket icon ("Fill & Line"). Here, you can change a solid fill color, apply a gentle gradient for depth, use a subtle pattern, or even fill a shape with a picture (use this one sparingly!). To highlight just one specific data point – like your best sales quarter – click the bar or slice once to select the entire series, then click it a second time to isolate just that one point. Now, any style change you make will only apply to that single element.
• Border: In the same section, you can add or modify the outline of your shapes. You can change the border color, width (or thickness), and even make it dashed or dotted. A subtle border can help distinguish segments in a pie chart or bars that are close in color.
• Effects: Click the pentagon icon ("Effects"). Here you can add subtle shadows, glows, or soft edges for a more modern feel. Be careful with the 3-D options - while powerful, they can sometimes distort the data and make it harder to read accurately.

Customizing the Chart Background

You can format two different background areas:

• Chart Area: The entire background, including the area around the title and legend.
• Plot Area: Just the box where your data is actually plotted.

Right-click a blank space inside the gridlines and select Format Plot Area, or right-click blank space outside the gridlines and select Format Chart Area. The options are the same as styling a data series. You can add a subtle, solid color fill (like light grey) or a gradient to make your chart pop off the page. Separately styling the Plot Area can help frame your data nicely.

Improving Readability: Formatting Text Elements

Don't forget the text! Your chart title, axis labels, legend, and data labels are all customizable. For quick changes, just single-click any text element and use the font tools on the Home tab of the ribbon to change the font, size, color, or make it bold.

For more control, double-click the text element to open the Format Pane. Here, you can add text outlines or fill effects. The most important rule is contrast. Make sure your text color is easily readable against its background.

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Tweaking Axes and Gridlines

Axes and gridlines provide context but should never overpower your data. Double-click an axis or a gridline to format it.

• Axes: You can change the color, width, and style of the axis line itself. Under the "Axis Options" icon (the one that looks like a bar chart), you can also change the number formatting (e.g., Currency, Percentage) and adjust the scale by setting the minimum and maximum bounds.
• Gridlines: Overly prominent gridlines can be distracting. Consider making them a lighter shade of grey or changing the line style to a faint dash to make them less visually demanding. In many cases, especially for presentations, removing them completely leads to a cleaner look.

Putting It All Together: Best Practices for Effective Chart Styling

Now that you know all the tools, here are a few best practices to guide you toward creating professional-looking, effective charts.

• Keep It Simple: The goal is to clarify, not to decorate. Avoid using too many colors, cluttered backgrounds, or intense 3D effects. The story in your data should be the hero.
• Use Color with Purpose: Color should guide the viewer's eye. Instead of a rainbow of colors, use a neutral color for most data and a single, bold color to highlight the item you want to emphasize.
• Be Consistent: If you're creating multiple charts for one report, use the same styles, colors, and fonts throughout to create a unified and professional document.
• Save Your Style as a Template: Did you create the perfect chart design? Save it as a template to reuse it later! Once your chart is styled exactly how you want it, right-click on it and select Save as Template... Give it a descriptive name and save it. The next time you create a chart, go to Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts, click on the Templates folder, and your custom design will be there waiting for you. This is a massive time saver for monthly or weekly reports.

Final Thoughts

Styling charts in Excel lets you move beyond default settings to create visualizations that are clear, professional, and impactful. Whether you use a quick preset style, apply a new color palette, or manually format every last element, taking control of your chart’s appearance is a critical step in turning raw data into a compelling story.

While mastering Excel is a valuable skill, crafting the perfect report over and over often feels like manual busywork. At Graphed, we automate the tedious parts of reporting. Instead of spending your time exporting data and right-clicking on individual chart elements, you can connect your data sources directly and ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard comparing ad spend to revenue this quarter." We instantly build live, interactive dashboards, helping you skip the formatting headaches and get straight to the insights.