Chapter 3 Working with Charts 97
EXCEL TIPS
You can also use the format buttons on the Home tab to change
the font color, font style, alignment, and fi ll color of chart and
axes titles.
You can further format chart and axes titles by selecting the title
and then clicking the Format Selection button from the Current
Selection group on the Layout tab of the Chart Tools ribbon. The
button opens a Format Axis Title dialog box containing several
formatting options.
Editing the Chart Axes
Next you’ll look at editing the values displayed in the chart. Even though
all of the Big Ten graduation rates are 50% or greater in this chart, Excel
uses a range of 0 to 100%; and even though the lowest SAT score is 1105,
Excel uses a lower range of 0 in the chart. The effect of this is that all of the
data are clustered in the upper right edge of the chart, leaving a large blank
space to the left and below. There are some situations where you want your
charts to show the complete range of possible values and other situations
where you want to concentrate on the range of observed values. In that case,
you rescale the axes so that the scales more closely match the range of the
observed values. You can change the scale of the axes by clicking the Axes
button on the Chart Tools ribbon. Start with changing the scale on the x axis
to better match the range of calculated SAT scores for the 11 schools in the
data sample.
To change the scale of the x axis:
1 Click the Axes button from the Axes group on the Layout tab of the
Chart Tools ribbon, click Primary Horizontal Axis and then click
More Primary Horizontal Axis Options. Excel opens the Format
Axis dialog box.
2 Verify that the Axis Options tab is selected. On this tab the options
for the axis scale are shown. By default, Excel automatically selects
the minimum and maximum range of the axis values. You want to
change the minimum from 0 to 1000, set the maximum at 1500, and
set the interval between tick marks on the axis to 50 units. To make
this change, do the following steps:
3 Click the Fixed option button for the Axis minimum and enter 1000
in the accompanying text box.
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