Bar chart showing the quantity of food consumed by the Hungry Caterpillar per day.
You then decide to tweak the chart design to arrive at this:
Bar chart showing the quantity of food consumed by the Hungry Caterpillar, with a different design to the previous image.
As you can imagine, there were quite a few steps to get here. So what happens when you receive another chart from someone and they ask “Can you make this look like that other lovely chart you designed please?”.
Do you:
Walk away?
Try to remember how you made your phone number australia beautiful chart last week/month/year?
Use a chart template?
Of course you opt for the third option, but how? You can do it like this:
Right click on it
Select Save as Template…
Give it a fancy name (meaningful also works) and click Save
This creates a crtx chart template file on your computer. That means it’s available to you only, unless you share it with colleagues or ask you friendly IT administrator to deploy it to the company.
Same bar chart as previous image with the right-click menu expanded and the 'Save as Template...' option highlighted.
Now you can use your template to restyle existing charts as follows:
Right click on the chart to be styled
Click Change Chart Type…
And now for the magic, click the Templates tab on the left of the window.
From there you’ll see all of the chart templates you’ve created.
Click the one you want and click OK to save hours of fiddling.
You can also create a brand-new chart from your templates by clicking the Recommended Charts button in Excel’s Insert tab, or the little arrow in the bottom right-hand side of the charts group, followed by the All Charts tab in the window that appears.