Choosing a Chart Style

A chart style is a combination of foreground and background colors designed to coordinate with your cell styles, shape styles, and table styles to give your workbook a consistent, professional, and high-impact appearance. To apply a chart style, select the chart, choose Design under Chart Tools on the Ribbon, and then open the Chart Styles gallery.

The gallery options let you do such things as apply attractive gradient fills to your chart backgrounds, add photorealistic highlighting to bar and column markers, switch line-chart markers from fat to svelte, and so on. The best way to see the wealth of possibilities is to select a chart, open the gallery, and experiment.

Note that cell styles, table styles, and chart styles are all components of the current theme. That is, when you change the theme applied to your workbook (by clicking Page Layout on the Ribbon and opening the Themes gallery at the left side of the Ribbon), your available cell styles, table styles, and chart styles all change as well.

For more information about themes, see "Formatting with Themes" on page 275. For more information about cell styles, see "Formatting with Cell Styles" on page 278. For more information about table styles, see "Formatting Tables" on page 705.