Formatting Chart Category Labels

  • Thread starter Thread starter WEP CPA
  • Start date Start date
W

WEP CPA

I'm creating a fairly complex chart - a spider graph "dashboard" report that
addresses 4 major areas of an organization's performance - finance, quality,
efficiency and customer satisfaction. Each category has 4-7 data elements,
so that there are a total of 22 data elements on the chart. There will be 2
sections of the report, a chart showing YTD, LYTD and Goal values for the
data elements and the graph itself. I envision this as a relatively easy way
for management or board to get a snapshot of comparative key performance
indicators. So far so good - input form, calculations, data chart and graph
are all created and working properly, now it's a matter of presentation.

Each major category is formatted to a different color on the data report -
Financial = green, Quality = Red, Efficiency = Blue and Customer Satisfaction
= Black. I would like to carry this formatting over to the graph so that the
category labels are 4 different colors. I can change the format of the
category labels, but I only see how to change them to one particular color,
and I'd like 4 different colors.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
Re: spider charts (or radar charts). I find these less effective than
parallel coordinate charts:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ParallelCoord.html

Re: the colored labels. If you do in fact make a parallel coordinate chart,
you can use the techniques for making a custom-scaled axis, keep the ticks
and gridlines of the original axis, and replace the axis labels with data
labels from the helper series. These data labels can be independently
formatted.

Custom-scaled axes:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ArbitraryAxis.html

If you keep the radar chart, you can still add a custom series with data
labels; you will just have to select coordinates that put the labels where
you need them.

- Jon
 
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