Chapter 3 Working with Charts 109
When you label every data point, there is often a problem with overcrowd-
ing. Points that are close together tend to have their labels overlap, as is the
case with the Iowa, Ohio State, and Purdue labels in Figure 3-22. This is not
necessarily bad if you’re interested mainly in points that lie outside the norm.
Formatting Labels
You’ve learned that the Big Ten university that has a low graduation rate
for its students relative to the average SAT score of its freshman class is
Minnesota. You might wonder why its graduation rate is so much lower
than the rates for the other universities. On the basis of the values in the
chart, you would expect a graduation rate between 65 and 75% for an aver-
age SAT score of around 1140, not one as low as 58%. Perhaps it is because
Minneapolis–St. Paul is the largest city among Big Ten towns, and students
might have more distractions there, or the composition of the student body
might be different. Columbus is the next largest city, and Ohio State is next
to last in graduation rate with 66%, which seems to verify this hypothesis.
On the other hand, Northwestern is in Evanston, right next door to Chicago,
the biggest midwestern city, so you might expect it to have a low graduation
rate too. However, Northwestern is also a private school with an elite stu-
dent body and high admission standards and has a graduation rate of 93%.
Minnesota’s graduation rate still seems curious. You decide to mark this
point for further study by changing the color of the label to boldface red.
To format a label:
1 Click any label in the chart to select all of the labels in the data
series.
Note that selection handles appear around each label. If you wanted to
format all of the labels simultaneously, you could do this by applying
any of Excel’s formatting commands to this selected group. To format a
single label, you have to select it again from the group of labels.
2 Click the MINN label.
The selection label is now limited to only the Minnesota point.
3 Click the Font Color button from the Font group on the Home
tab and change the font color to red (the second entry in the list of
standard colors).
4 Click the Bold button from the Font group.
5 Click outside the chart to deselect it. The format of the MINN data
label should now be boldface red.
