How to Format Data Series in Excel

A well-built Excel chart can tell a powerful story, but a poorly formatted one just creates confusion. If you want your audience to grasp the insights you're presenting, formatting your data series is the most critical step. This guide will walk you through exactly how to format data series in Excel, transforming your charts from basic plots into clear, professional visualizations.

What is a Data Series Anyway?

Before changing anything, let's get our terms straight. A data series is simply a set of related data points that are plotted on your chart. Think of it as a specific set of numbers from your spreadsheet that you want to visualize.

For example, if you have a spreadsheet tracking monthly sales:

• A column chart showing total sales for each month has one data series (Total Sales).
• A line chart comparing "West Coast Sales" and "East Coast Sales" over a year has two data series (one for each coast).
• A stacked column chart showing the breakdown of your ad spend by channel (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads) has three data series.

Each set of numbers you select to be visualized as bars, lines, or pie slices becomes its own distinct data series.

Why Formatting Your Data Series Matters

You might think formatting is just about "making it pretty," but it's much more than that. Strategic formatting directly impacts how effectively you communicate your data story. It helps you:

• Improve Clarity: Differentiating series with distinct colors or styles prevents confusion, especially in charts with a lot of data. You can instantly tell which bar or line represents which category.
• Highlight Key Information: Do you want to draw attention to a specific dataset, like this year's sales figures compared to last year's? Formatting allows you to make one series bold and vibrant while toning down the others.
• Enhance Professionalism: A clean, well-formatted chart shows attention to detail and credibility. A default, unformatted chart can look lazy or unfinished.
• Tell a Cohesive Story: Using consistent brand colors across your reports helps build a recognizable and professional identity for your analytics.

Accessing the ‘Format Data Series’ Menu

Excel packs all the formatting options you need into a single, powerful menu. Getting there is easy. The most straightforward way is:

1. Create your chart in Excel.
2. Right-click directly on the data series you want to format. For a column chart, right-click on one of the bars. For a line chart, right-click on the line itself.
3. From the dropdown menu that appears, select Format Data Series...

This will open a pane on the right side of your Excel window, which is your command center for all things related to formatting that specific series.

Pro Tip: If you simply double-click on a data series, that will also typically open the Format Data Series pane directly.

Your Guide to the Key Formatting Options

Once you've opened the pane, you'll see a few icons at the top. The two most important ones for our purposes are the "Fill & Line" (paint bucket icon) and "Series Options" (chart icon).

1. Mastering Fill & Line Options

This tab is where you control the visual appearance of your series – the colors, borders, and textures.

Fill Settings

The "Fill" section determines the main color and appearance of your series (the inside of your bars, columns, or pie slices).

• Solid fill: The most common option. This lets you select a single, solid color for your series. It's often the best choice for clarity. Use colors that match your company's branding or choose a high-contrast color to make a series stand out.
• Gradient fill: This creates a smooth transition between two or more colors. It can add some visual flair, but use it sparingly, as it can sometimes make charts harder to read.
• Picture or texture fill: Allows you to fill a series with an image or a preset texture (like woodgrain or water droplets). Be extremely cautious with this one - it can easily make a chart look dated and unprofessional. It's almost always better to stick with solid colors.
• Pattern fill: Fills the series with a pattern like stripes or dots. This can be a useful accessibility feature for black-and-white printing, as different patterns can distinguish series without relying on color.

Border Settings

The "Border" section controls the outline around your data series. This is especially useful for bar and column charts.

• Solid line: Adds a solid border around the selected series.
• No line: The default for many chart types, removing any visible border.
• Color: Change the border's color. A dark border can visually separate cluttered bars, while a light or nonexistent border gives a cleaner, more modern look.
• Width: Adjust how thick the border line is.
• Dash type: Change the border from a solid line to dashes or dots. This can be used to represent projected or secondary data.

For line charts, the options in this tab look a bit different. You'll have settings for the Line (color, width, dash type) and the Marker (the dots or squares that appear on each data point). Customizing markers is an excellent way to distinguish multiple lines on a single chart without relying solely on color.

2. Adjusting Series Options

The "Series Options" tab is where the magic really happens. The settings here change dramatically depending on your chart type, allowing you to control the spacing, positioning, and scale of your data series.

For Column and Bar Charts

• Series Overlap: This setting controls how much the bars of different series overlap with each other within the same category. At 0%, the bars touch. A negative value (e.g., -50%) will create a gap between them, which improves readability. A positive value will cause them to overlap, which can be useful for comparing actual vs. target data.
• Gap Width: This setting controls the amount of empty space between categories (e.g., the space between the bars for "January" and "February"). Reducing the gap width makes the bars themselves wider and more prominent. A good starting point is usually around 100-150%.

For Pie and Doughnut Charts

• Angle of first slice: This lets you rotate the entire pie chart. It's useful for bringing a specific slice to the front and center for better visibility.
• Pie Explosion: This slides the slices of the pie away from the center. You'll typically use this on a single data point (by clicking a slice once to select the series, then again to select just that slice) to make one slice "pop" out and draw a lot of attention to it.

Plotting a Series on a Secondary Axis

This is one of Excel's most powerful, and often overlooked, features inside of Series Options. What do you do when you want to compare two data series on the same chart, but they use completely different scales? For instance, showing 'Revenue' (in millions of dollars) and 'Click-Through Rate' (a low percentage) on the same column chart.

If you plot them together normally, the percentage data will look like a flat line at zero. The solution is a secondary axis.

1. Right-click the data series you want to move to a new axis (in this case, the 'Click-Through Rate').
2. Choose Format Data Series...
3. In the "Series Options" tab, you'll see a section called "Plot Series On." Select Secondary Axis.

Excel will instantly add a new vertical axis on the right side of your chart scaled for that specific data series. It's standard practice to display the secondary axis series as a different chart type, like a line, to avoid confusion. You can do this by right-clicking the series and going to "Change Series Chart Type."

3. Formatting a Single Data Point

Sometimes you don't want to format the entire series, but just one single element within it. Maybe you want to highlight the bar for your highest sales month, or pull out one slice of a pie chart.

This is easy to do:

1. First, click once on the data series to select all the data points in that series (e.g., all the blue bars).
2. Then, wait a moment and click a second time on the specific data point you want to change (e.g., just the bar for "December").
3. Now, any changes you make in the "Format Data Point" pane will only apply to that single element.

Quick Tips for Great Formatting

• Be Consistent: A messy report with inconsistent colors and styles looks unprofessional and is confusing. If "Sales" are represented by a blue bar in one chart, they should be blue in all of your charts.
• Leverage Brand Colors: If your company has a style guide with specific colors, use them! This creates a professional look and reinforces brand identity. Designate one vibrant brand color to always highlight your most important metric.
• Prioritize Readability: The goal is clarity, not complexity. Avoid heavy 3D effects, shadows, and busy picture fills. Simple, clean, and high-contrast designs are almost always more effective.
• Avoid the Automatic Colors: Excel's default color palette has a very distinct "I just made this in Excel" look. Taking 30 seconds to choose your own colors from a more modern palette will make your work stand out.

Final Thoughts

Diving into the "Format Data Series" pane can feel like a lot at first, but mastering these options is what separates amateur Excel users from pros. By going beyond the defaults and thinking strategically about color, spacing, and emphasis, you can create reports that not only show data but truly communicate valuable insight.

Ultimately, a lot of time in Excel is spent just getting the data into a presentable state. When you're constantly connecting to different data sources and manually re-creating these charts, formatting can become a repetitive chore. This is why we built Graphed to automate the entire process. After securely connecting your data sources just once, you can ask for visualizations in plain English - like "create a bar chart showing revenue by month" or "build a dashboard of our Facebook Ads performance." We instantly generate clean, professional charts and live dashboards, freeing you up to focus on the insights, not just the formatting.