Excel Chart Legend

Chart Legend in Excel

A legend is a description of major elements of an excel chart. It helps in easy access of any chart. They are usually represented by colors or symbols. In this article, we will learn about Legend and its uses with the help of the examples.

How to Add a Legend to Excel Chart?

Example #1 – Change Order of Legend

For instance, there is a range of Products that a company ABC sells and after a few days of selling the product, the company seeks for reviews from its customers by asking them to rate the product on 10.

Since the company is dealing with multiple products and is trying to make a place in the market, it keeps a track of each customer and their ratings as follows.

In the above example, we have taken only ten customers for ease of understanding. However, a company may have multiple customers for a single product.

With the use of Excel legends, we can understand the products and their ratings in a better way.

• In an excel file, we have Option Insert and on the right side outlined in black, the following options for the charts would be given. We can choose from a range of charts that is from Recommended Charts to Scatter charts or a simple one.

• For the convenience of explanation and understanding, we have selected one of the basic charts as follows.

• We will have a chart like below one.

• As soon as the chart is selected, we will be navigated automatically to the design option for formatting. Here in the example, we have chosen the first design. And, we can edit the design any number of times even after the final chart and legend adjustments are done.

In the Design Option, we have an icon of Add Chart Element at the left side of the sheet as highlighted below. When we click on that we get a pop-down menu as you can see below. The pop-down menu has an option – Legend as shown below.

• To bring the Legend on the Chart, we go to the Chart Tools – Design – Add chart element – Legend – Top.

• As soon as we do this, there appears an extra element on the chart shown as follows.

This is a Legend. A legend gives us a direction as to what is marked in the chart in blue color. In our example, it is the Ratings from customers.

The above process looks simple. Let me guess what you are thinking!

Why this?

This may look simple. However, as I mentioned earlier, a company may have several customers for a single product or there may be several products in an organization with a different class of customers.

As you might have observed that in the above example we have taken just one simple Rating!

Example #2 – Change Format of Legend

However, to explain it better, let us take another example of multiple data elements to make a chart three different products as mentioned on the next page.

The following is a list of customers and their sales value for each product.

When we make a chart for this following the above procedures, then our graph will look like this. And the Legend will be represented by different colors as represented by the arrow that is Blue for Burger, Orange for Fries and Green for Noodles.

We can customize the legends as per the explanation above and can select from a range of options to make any alterations. As you can see the legend is at the top of the chart. We can edit it to bring it to Top, Bottom, Right or Left as per the need and convenience.

• Moving ahead with the Legends, when we double click on the legends part of the chart as shown with an arrow then we get Format Legend Option.

• The Format Legend Option Area has 3 icons as shown below.

• From the Icon Legend Options as mentioned in the above screenshot, we can select from various options to adjust the chart that is Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Top right. For instance, here we have changed the option to left. Now my chart looks as follows. The legend appears on the left side now.

• Meanwhile, we also have the option to change the color of the Legends. Go to Design – Click on Change colors in the drop-down menu. We have the option of changing the colors of our Legends.

• The new chart looks like the following:

• We also have the option of changing the names of the Legend. Go to the option Chart Filters. It helps to edit and modify the names and areas of the Chart elements. Then click on Select Data as highlighted below in red.

• When we select the above option, a pop-up menu called the Select Data Source screen appears as follows. There is an option of Edit.

• The below-mentioned screenshot is the next step where the Edit Series with “Burger” comes under the Series Name. Here we have the option of editing the Name of the Legend.

• We have replaced the name “Burger” with another name “Ham Burger” and then click OK.

• The chart looks like this now.

• In the same way, we can edit and replace the names of the Legends as per the needs.

Conclusion

• Legends may occupy a very small cornered area in any Chart of an Excel sheet, however, is one of the most important areas.
• It characterizes the units of any chart in the best possible way with the required details for the viewers. It can be customized as per the needs.
• It makes the presentation easier and better.
• The Legends are used for analyzing the data in a better way compared to normal tabular contents.
• It helps in comparison to multiple data and assists in better understanding of the data.
• It is one of the most important parts of any chart and is present in all of them.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to Excel Chart Legend. Here we discuss how to add and format legends in the Excel chart along with examples and a downloadable excel template. You may learn more about excel from the following articles –

• Chart Wizard in Excel
• Power BI Pie Chart
• Interactive Chart in Excel
• Power BI Charts
• Spell Check in Excel