Here is a new feature in Excel 2002- you can show multiple items in the data labels on your charts. Before, you could just show one item.
Even if you don't have Excel 2002, if you never have used data labels in charts, this will also show you how.
The exercise and result are in the Chart Data Label file.
Here is a margin report we start with.
Let's create a simple chart on margins.
As we go through the chart wizard, in step 3 there is a tab for Data Labels. In Excel 2002, we get expanded options. In prior versions, if we recall correctly, you could only pick one item to be contained in a label.
With Excel 2002, you get this range of choices:
Multiple items to check off to contain in the data label
How do want the items separated, if you pick multiple items to be displayed. Options include separate line, comma, period, semicolon and other options.
If you want to show a legend key also, in which case you would also see a small legend box. This would be applicable if you were graphing multiple data points on the same bar, for example. We left it blank above since this is a simple chart. You might find you will still prefer to show a separate legend rather than checking this.
After we finish, here is our result.
In a prior version of Excel, on this chart we might just show the value. For this Excel 2002 version, all this information in the data label is a little overkill, but we show it to demonstrate some of the range of what you can now do here with Excel 2002.
Regardless of what version of Excel you have, consider taking advantage of data labels on your chart to give a clearer picture and save having to refer back to the data.