How to Apply Chart Style 14 in Excel

Excel’s default charts get the job done, but applying a built-in style like Style 14 can instantly make your data look more professional and polished. Instead of manually changing colors, fonts, and backgrounds, you can transform your chart with a single click. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to find and apply Chart Style 14 in Excel and customize it to perfectly match your presentation or report.

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What Are Chart Styles in Excel?

Before we jump into the "how-to," let's quickly cover what Chart Styles are. Think of them as pre-designed templates for your charts. When you create a chart in Excel, it starts with a default, basic appearance. The Chart Styles gallery offers a collection of professionally designed formats that you can apply instantly. These styles control a combination of design elements, including:

• Color Schemes: The specific colors used for bars, lines, or pie slices in your chart.
• Backgrounds: Whether the chart has a plain white, gray, a gradient, or even a dark background.
• Effects: Subtle design touches like shadows, gradients, and outlines on your data series.
• Font Styles: The typography used for the chart title, axis labels, and data labels.
• Gridlines and Axes: The appearance and visibility of gridlines and the chart's axes.

Using these pre-set styles has a few fantastic benefits. First, it saves you an enormous amount of time. Instead of spending 20 minutes tweaking individual colors and shading, you can get a great-looking chart in seconds. Second, it promotes consistency. If you're creating multiple charts for a report, applying the same style to all of them ensures a cohesive and professional look across your entire document.

A Quick Refresher: Creating a Chart

To apply a style, you first need a chart. If you're starting from scratch or need a quick reminder, here’s how to create a basic chart from your data. Let's imagine you have simple sales data in your spreadsheet, with months in one column and revenue in another.

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Step 1: Select Your Data

Click and drag your mouse to highlight all the cells you want to include in the chart. Be sure to include both the data series (e.g., your revenue numbers) and the labels for that data (e.g., the months). This context is crucial for Excel to build the chart correctly.

Pro Tip: You can select non-adjacent columns by holding down the Ctrl key (or Cmd key on a Mac) while you click and drag over the different sections of data you want to include.

Step 2: Go to the "Insert" Tab

With your data selected, click on the Insert tab in the main Excel ribbon at the top of the screen. Here, you'll find a section called "Charts" filled with different icons representing various chart types.

Step 3: Choose Your Chart Type

Click on the chart type that best represents your data. For our example of monthly revenue, a bar/column chart or a line chart would work perfectly.

• Column or Bar Chart: Excellent for comparing values across different categories, like sales per month or per product.
• Line Chart: Ideal for showing trends over time, such as website traffic over a quarter.
• Pie Chart: Best used for showing the proportional breakdown of a whole, like the percentage of sales coming from different regions.

After you click on an option, a basic chart will immediately appear on your worksheet. Now, you’re ready to apply Chart Style 14.

How to Apply Chart Style 14 (Step-by-Step)

With your chart created and selected, let's give it a design upgrade. Applying Chart Style 14 is incredibly straightforward. It's often a style with a dark background and high-contrast elements, which can make your data pop in presentations.

Step 1: Select Your Chart

First, make sure your chart is active. Just click anywhere on the chart object on your worksheet. When you do this, you’ll notice two new tabs appear on the Excel ribbon at the far right: Chart Design and Format. These are called contextual tabs because they only show up when a chart is selected.

If you don’t see these tabs, it means your chart isn't selected. Click on it again to make them visible. We'll be working in the Chart Design tab.

Step 2: Navigate to the "Chart Design" Tab

Click on the Chart Design tab. This is your command center for everything related to your chart's structure, layout, and appearance. Here you'll find options for adding chart elements, changing colors, and, most importantly, accessing the Chart Styles gallery.

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Step 3: Locate the "Chart Styles" Gallery

On the Chart Design tab, you'll see a small horizontal gallery labeled Chart Styles. This gallery shows you a handful of pre-designed styles. Excel displays about six to eight styles by default, but there are many more to choose from.

Look for the small down arrow or the "More" button (an arrow pointing down with a line above it) located at the bottom-right corner of this gallery. Clicking it will expand the gallery to reveal all the available styles.

Step 4: Find and Select "Style 14"

Now that you can see all the options, simply hover your mouse over each one. As you do, your actual chart will provide a live preview of what that style looks like. This is extremely helpful for finding the perfect look without having to click and undo repeatedly.

Each style has a name that appears when you hover over it (e.g., "Style 1," "Style 2," etc.). Scan through the options until you find Style 14. Depending on your version of Excel, its appearance might vary slightly, but it often features a dramatic, dark aesthetic with bright, vibrant colors for the data series.

Once you’ve found it, click on it. Your chart will instantly update, adopting all the formatting properties of Style 14.

Customizing Beyond Chart Style 14

Applying Style 14 is a great start, but you're not stuck with its exact default settings. Excel gives you powerful and intuitive tools to fine-tune the look even further. Think of the pre-set style as a starting point, not a final destination.

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Changing the Color Palette

Right next to the Chart Styles gallery on the Chart Design tab, you'll find a button called Change Colors. Clicking this reveals a dropdown menu with a variety of color palettes. These are grouped into "Colorful" and "Monochromatic" sections.

• Colorful Palettes: These use a range of different hues that work well together. This is great for making distinct categories in a bar chart stand out from one another.
• Monochromatic Palettes: These use different shades and tints of a single color (like various blues or greens). This option is perfect for creating a clean, branded report where you already have a primary company color.

Hover over any of these palettes to see a live preview on your Style 14 chart. You might find that the dark background of Style 14 looks even better with a bright green monochromatic palette than the multi-color default.

Fine-Tuning Individual Chart Elements

What if you like everything about Style 14 except for the font size of the axis labels? You can easily change that. Every single element on your chart is individually editable.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Click to Select an Element: Want to edit the chart title? Just click on it. Want to change the horizontal axis labels? Click on them. When you select an element, a bounding box will appear around it.
2. Use the "Format" Tab: With an element selected, you can use the options on the Format tab on the ribbon to make changes. For text elements, you can change the font, size, color, and add effects like shadows. For shapes like the bars in a bar chart, you can change their fill color, outline, and shape effects.
3. Use the Buttons on the Chart: Modern versions of Excel also include three small buttons that appear to the right of your selected chart: a plus sign (+), a paintbrush, and a filter cone. The paintbrush is a handy shortcut to the Styles and Colors galleries, while the plus sign lets you add or remove chart elements like data labels, a legend, or a trendline.

For example, if the gridlines added by Style 14 feel too cluttered, you can click on one of them, press the Delete key, and they'll disappear, giving your chart a cleaner focus on the data itself.

Final Thoughts

Applying pre-designed layouts like Chart Style 14 is a simple yet powerful way to lift your reports from a basic spreadsheet view to a professional-grade analysis. Using the Chart Design tab, you can instantly upgrade the look of any chart, save time on manual formatting, and maintain a consistent look across all your data visualizations.

While Excel is great for this kind of one-off chart enhancement, creating reports on a regular basis often involves a repetitive cycle of downloading CSVs, wrangling data, and building the same charts week after week. At a certain point, that manual effort becomes a bottleneck. We built Graphed to automate that entire workflow. The idea is to stop rebuilding reports and instead get live dashboards that update themselves. By connecting your data sources directly to Graphed, you can simply ask for the charts and metrics you want in plain English, and it builds an interactive, real-time dashboard for you in seconds.