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Who doesn’t love a well-designed chart that helps visualise your data and turn it into valuable information? They’re used in Excel for reporting and in PowerPoint presentations to help tell your story. But as soon as different people start creating them, well, they start to look like they were designed by different people. Templates are your best friend when it comes to consistently branding Microsoft Office documents. So, what’s available to you when it comes to charts and graphs?
Charts and graphs can be created in Excel, PowerPoint phone number afghanistan or Word, but under the hood, they all use Excel. Even though you can create them from scratch in PowerPoint, the most common way to get them onto a slide is to create them in Excel and copy and paste them over to PowerPoint.
This creates a brand consistency challenge. If your Excel file isn’t using the same Office theme as your PowerPoint file, then things aren’t going to look like they came from the same brand. Fonts might be different, and even worse, colours. Check out our Three Amigos article to find out how to use a common theme across Microsoft Office.
For now, let’s find out how to use chart templates.
Template soup
You might already know that you can use templates to create consistent-looking files across the suite of Office apps such as PowerPoint, Excel and Word. They use the template-specific file formats of potx, xltx and dotx respectively. These help you set up your brand fonts and colours, but there’s more you can do with the charts you create inside Excel, PowerPoint and Word.
When you create a new chart in Excel, the first thing you’re steered towards is choosing which type of chart you want to insert from the ribbon:
Screenshot of the Charts area of the Insert ribbon in Microsoft Excel. Let’s assume you choose the column type and create a chart like this: