If you’ve got a column chart with lots of labels, chances are, the labels have gotten twisted diagonally, like this:

Diagonal text takes longer to read than plain ol’ horizontal text, so we want to avoid it.

In this lesson, you’ll learn 5 ways to fix those lonnng chart labels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixLC9irm6pA

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:58 Fix 1: Slow-to-Read Diagonal Text
• 1:18 Fix 2: Unreadable Tiny Text
• 1:38 Fix 3: Cartoonishly-Big Chart
• 2:38 Fix 4: Column Chart into Bar Chart (with Change Chart Type)
• 3:27 Fix 5: Forced Line Breaks in Chart Labels
• 3:56 What NOT To Do: Clicking the Space Bar a Bajillion Times
• 4:10 What TO Do: Alt + Enter
• 4:38 Mixing and Maxing these 5 Fixes for Your Dataset
• 4:58 Your Turn

Resources Mentioned

• Download the Excel file shown in the lesson
• Related tutorial: Adjusting the Outside and Inside Chart Borders in Excel

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] If your chart has really long labels, chances are, Excel did this.

It probably tilted the labels diagonally, which takes longer to read, obviously, or it might’ve done the thing where it gives you some of the words and then dot, dot, dot, and it cuts them off. And. We can’t keep that.

So in this video, I’m going to show you five fixes.

And your data set is going to be totally different from my super fake one that I have here.

So you’re going to have to try these different fixes and then please, please, please comment below the video and let me know which fix works for you. Um, I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel and PowerPoint and Word. And speaking of dataviz being on the go, I am leading office hours for my online course students in three minutes.

So let’s go, let’s go through these fixes really quickly. All right.

Fix number one [00:01:00] is you could just leave it alone and say, I don’t care if diagonal text takes longer to read, screw the people looking at this graph. They’re just going to have to take longer to read it. I know you’re not thinking that. I just wanted to show you like what, what not to do.

Okay. So we’re not just going to leave it like that.

Fix number two, uh, you could just say. I don’t care if people wear contacts or glasses. I’m just going to shrink down the font size until everything is horizontal. But, uh, I know, I know you’re not that rude. Okay. You’re not doing unreadable font either.

So that brings us to fix three, which actually might work. Fix three is you take your chart and you make it bigger until the labels are horizontal and it might have to be really big. It might have to be like, how big does it like this big? And then you have to adjust the inside border so you don’t have this weird white space.

I’ve got [00:02:00] other videos about this that I’ll link to up above too. If you’re like inside border, outside border, what’s that? You can go watch that quick tutorial as well. Now, enlarging the chart to get horizontal, easy to read labels, it might just work. Like if, if this chart is going into a wide PowerPoint slide, you can have a wide chart.

But what if your chart has to fit in this little teeny tiny spot on your dashboard screen? Then, uh, Your chart can’t be this wide, right? So this one gets like a, what are we kind of scoring the solution? Like a, a maybe, like a meh kind of squiggle. All right, fix four. You could change your columns into bars.

People think, Oh, now I’m going to have to delete my chart and start over. False. You don’t have to do that. You’re just going to take your chart and click on it. You’re going to do a right click and you go to change chart type. Bars and columns are similar, but Excel does not [00:03:00] consider them to be identical charts.

So you go to change chart type, it opens up the menu and you’re going to pick the bar chart. Okay. And then you still, of course, have to resize it a little bit. You’re left with this weird white space, but then your labels have all the breathing room that they need on the side. I often pick this solution.

I often change columns into bars. I have to do this for many, many projects. So that one’s going to get like a hooray. Check that it works. And then fix number five, I had to do this recently on a chart that looked similar to this. These aren’t the real countries or the real like scores or whatever this pretend data set would be about.

But the chart did look more or less like this. And I had to do fix five, which is forced. I’m going to show you what not to do, and then what to do. A forced line break would be, you take something that has two words, like South Korea. Here’s what not to do. You do space, space, space. And if you do enough [00:04:00] spaces, it forces a line break.

And that works, but there’s a little bit of a fancier behind the scenes workaround. So a forced line break, I would suggest would be Alt Enter. You’re going to have to look at your keyboard to do this. You’re going to click in between the two words where you want the line break and you’re going to do Alt Enter.

Hold down alt and then do enter, and it makes a new line. You can see it in that cell. You can see it up here in the formula bar, and then you can see it in the chart. In real life, you might actually have to mix and match some of these fixes. You might have to do a forced line break. You might have to enlarge the font size or shrink it just ever so slightly.

You might have to make the chart wider. Or not. Okay. So hopefully these five fixes have given you like some ideas, right? For your own troubleshooting. Okay. It is time for office [00:05:00] hours. I’ve got to go. I am a little bit late. Unfortunately, it’s your turn. Give this a try and comment below the video and let me know, did this work?

Did this not, did you run into some other challenge that you need help with? Let me know. And I’ll probably make a video just for you. Thank you.

Are you presenting online?

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Captions increase the accessibility of our recordings, making it easier for attendees with hearing issues, audio/tech glitches, and non-English speakers to follow our ideas.

In this lesson, you’ll learn about embedded captions with Sue Griffey.

(Embedded captions means that the captions are “stuck” or “burned” inside the video file itself, not as an extra button that viewers have to remember to click.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCkqJczsNYY

Resources Mentioned

https://www.descript.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go.

And in this video, you’ll learn about embedded captions from Sue Griffey.

All right. This is a, a progression of how I’ve done in captioning as Ann, working with Ann over the last four years, made me more and more aware of accessibility. And LinkedIn also, who were a couple of years ago, really focused on making sure we caption everything.

Um, I took to the opportunity when I do mentor time, and most of these slides are from the half hour professional development topic I do twice a month, um, to explore how to use My tools and the best tool was Descript because I could use it for editing and it also embeds captions. I wanted them embedded because people I work with globally told me they don’t always have the opportunity to turn on captions.

People get confused in YouTube about where to go [00:01:00] and that way I knew whatever was already done. So, this is now just the last, I would say, four to six months in, because this is a screenshot, and traditionally in the bottom of the screen I would put the footer for whatever reference I was extracting from.

And this is when Descript went from one kind of caption to All sorts of captions. They now have a range of them, and this was the default one. It’s huge, but it was like, I just got to get it done. So I did get it done. Not pretty, but it was there, and I do hear people tell me it’s useful. Then I realized I could take the time to adjust the captions, but what was bothering me was the fact that it overwrites things.

Yes, there was a lot here on this slide, but it What I was saying is this woman has a way to evaluate your biases. You can go see it later. I brought it to [00:02:00] Ann and to Office Hours to say, I really am needing to have captions in a way, and I’m thinking that I need to adjust my, my band at the bottom to make it wide enough just for the captions.

So, I’m I told Ann that I would try it out and then I came to office hours with captions and discovered that, um, with moving it around, I have a 1. 1 inch band at the bottom and Descript will let you do a single line, but sometimes it pushes you to a double line anyway. Add. a readable size. I think this was 36.

And Ann said to me, Sue, wouldn’t it be great if you could, I thought first you were saying, Ann, wouldn’t it be great if you could make the gray match each section, and I have three sections, a blue section, a green, a red section, and a green section. I know, well, I realized that when we talked. You were [00:03:00] saying make it transparent, and could you make the, the, font match what’s the font you use on screen.

Descript lets you change the size of it and it has some fonts, but this font was the closest I found to my font. Um, so this is what I now can do with Descript. I still have one troubleshooting thing. This is with a transparent background, Ann, but it still sort of puts a block around it. It’s like it’s a little darker.

And I don’t know if I’m choosing the wrong transparent and I haven’t had enough time to futz with it. But it now comes up as by itself. Anything that I need to for URLs are now above the red band. And I’m really happy with how it looks. It doesn’t look sloppy. And my, my, basically my available space is in the white.

So I don’t always have full bleed photos unless I’m doing a, a, uh, a [00:04:00] slide separator. But this is how it is, and I’m thrilled with it. I love this progression. I love the idea of just making the footer of the slide. What did you say? 1. 1 inches? 1. 1 inches. Measurement. Yep. Is that set up in your SlideMaster?

It is. Can I show you my SlideMaster? I’m so proud of it. I’d love to see it. Everything matches. Everything’s labeled except the dark red. I thought I had renamed that green, but yeah, I’m so happy with it and it makes me so restful now because I was trying to use a different one for teaching and a different one.

Now I’m like, nope, just one set. So, yeah, that’s, it’s all in there, everything’s set, and no problem with, the only thing I have to do, Descript doesn’t let you set an automatic setting for your captions, you have to choose the caption, I have to change the, um, size, I change the size from 50 down to 28, which is what I want.

[00:05:00] What most of my, this slide, um, the last slide I showed you was. It comes out looking professional and I can manage just fine. Can you talk me through, like, what do I need to do to do the embedded caption magic that you’ve done? I literally don’t know where to click. Yeah, go to the far right. And the second from the bottom choice in that panel, this is called Underlord, has all these helpful things.

And I use the classic one. It’s about two thirds of the way down below the yellow. I use classic. So, click on it so I can show you what comes up in the panel. So, you see it inserts the box, and you can adjust the size of the box. You can move it all the way down, you can make it smaller, you can make it wider.

So click on the, click on the box itself[00:06:00]

and it should, I’m trying to remember where it comes up, maybe it’s, there it is, yeah. So you see it automatically comes up in white and 50 with man rope whatever. So click on the white. Now that’s where I was choosing the transparency next to the Great. To the right of that. I chose that as transparent.

That was the lightest thing I could find. Yeah, and you know, it’s interesting then for me to think through what’s the opposite of that I have to do, because these aren’t slides, this is Excel, so I need the filled background. Right. And then it’s like, where does it fit with the webcam? Because a lot of times in the editing, I’ll go from full screen to the inset webcam and back again to keep it interesting.

Yeah. I think this webcam is set to be Whatever percent in Camtasia, like 25%. So when I do make it small, it is consistently that size. So I literally didn’t even know this was [00:07:00] all possible. This is so fascinating. You move the box over, make it wide, make it small. Yeah. Um, but then let me show you, hit the classic button.

under classic, and that’s where you get the border and the background. So background is where I then, um, yeah. But yeah, that’s your fill color, so you want to change that to black, uh, to, you want to leave that white or whatever. Oh, you’re purple. I don’t think I want to do purple. I think that would be too hard to read.

Um, I’m just noticing they have an upper in here. Oops, I didn’t mean to click on that red. Um, black? No, white. White. White on black. Just go down to the white button. Go to the color panel down below and hit the white button. This is my font color. I don’t know. Font. Black font. Okay, then go to background.

Yeah. White background. [00:08:00] With maybe a hair. Transparency?

Nope.

Yeah, you’ve got, it’s just bolded around, it’s just white around the day, the text itself, not the whole box. Active word, that’s an interesting one. Yeah, there’s, I mean, it’s fun to play with all of these. Yeah. I’m working with someone now who’s neurodivergent and I chatted with her the other day about what’s not working for her in the course, and she loves captions, but I said, do you want it where it highlights each word?

And she said, no, that would be too distracting, so. Do export at the top left. Yep. And then You hit video. I export the transcript first and then I export videos. So, but that’s just me. I like [00:09:00] to have a word doc of everything because people often want to go back and see what the actual wording was that we struggled through on their CVs or whatever.

I think Descript is still the captioning tool. It is. I don’t think there’s one that has more features and more correctness than this one out there. New tech gets invented all the time, but. If anybody here wants to try one, Descript is the starting point. They have a free trial, too. I forget how much it is after that, but I’m sure the site spells out the different levels of subscriptions.

Thank you so much, Sue. You’re welcome. It’s fun to geek out on this.

During Office Hours, Sue Griffey walked us through the pros and cons of 3 different mapping approaches:

1. Pin drop maps (made for free with Google)
2. Heat maps (made with Excel)
3. Tile grid maps (also made in Excel)
4. Overlay maps (tile grids, icon stacks, or waffles on top of traditional geographic maps)

In this video, you’ll learn about the challenges of each approach. You’ll also gain some how-to tips. Thanks, Sue!

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro: Mapping course registrants
• 0:58 Ann’s ideas from previous Office Hours session
• 1:21 Google’s “pin drop” maps
• 2:30 Excel’s heat maps
• 3:27 Excel’s binary maps (filled vs. empty)
• 3:42 Pros and cons of Excel maps
• 5:40 Pros and cons of tile grid maps
• 6:50 The “overlay” of the tile grid map on the geography map
• 7:33 World map challenges
• 8:06 Sue’s preference
• 9:20 How to make Google’s pin drop maps
• 9:55 Ann’s ideas and commentary
• 11:20 Sue’s homework assignment: Try icon stacks + an overlay
• 12:40 Sue’s final thoughts

Related YouTube Lessons about Mapping

• How to Make Maps in Excel: Heat Maps and Binary Maps
• Why Isn’t My Map Working?! 10 Excel Troubleshooting Tips

Resources Mentioned in the Video

• Jon Schwabish’s world tile grid map
• Google’s “pin drop” map
• Shelly Cheng’s “overlay” of stacked icons on a geographic map

Transcript

[00:00:00] You’re watching Dataviz On The Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel.

In this lesson, you’re going to learn about maps with Sue Griffey.

Several weeks ago, I brought to office hours some mapping I was doing. I have a short course and I wanted to map the number of registrants I’ve had.

Um, and I’ve been doing this over time, since I started the course, and I work globally, so I needed a world map. So I brought a couple examples, including a tile map that a friend of Ann’s and mine developed, Jon Schwabish, and I I was also working on what Ann had taught us about geography, the geography part of charting in Excel.

So I actually have three different things to show you and then I’ll tell you where I landed and why. So I’m going to show you the progression. Not surprisingly, when [00:01:00] I was doing this, Ann said, here are the three things you need to try. So you’ll notice as I switch each topic in the bottom right corner is a check mark of what we’re starting on.

The data set. That is really easy, 79 countries, 652 people. And two years ago for my infographic at the end of 2022, I used something that was in Google. It’s a free, it’s not just a Google map. You go to your own map settings and they give you a world map. You can look at it and I hadn’t used it then for two years until this time.

Both times, it’s only required me to upload a CSV file, which is good. Now, you can see the little white panel at the top, and I’ll show you after it’s in the next slide. I decided to start with this because I know, knew how to use it. Um, they’ve added a few more features. So, When I [00:02:00] added the CSV file, it automatically graded, as you can see in the top right, um, from dark gray where there were 56 or more to light gray.

And, uh, I discovered I could choose to, choose to show data labels, which it couldn’t do a couple years ago. So what it looks like up close, that circled five, it, you can see it, but it’s not that easy to see all the data labels. You can’t do anything more. So that was the map I started with. And then I went back to Excel to try to figure out what Excel would give me for a map, because Ann’s examples have used data labels.

State, U. S. state level maps only, as I recall. And I discovered, oh, there is a way to do a heat map in Excel world charting. I’m going to show you the examples, then I’ll show you the behind the scenes. And I discovered that it did let you put in data labels. Now, obviously, this isn’t all [00:03:00] 79 countries. So, here’s my plus minus.

It was pretty easy, similar to Google Maps, to create this map. You cannot change anything except the color for the gradient. You can’t annotate it. I can’t even change the plot size. And in fact, when I pasted this version, the previous version, in as an ex, as a Microsoft Excel object, I couldn’t even move it around very easily.

But I was also able. With, um, just a slightly revised dataset to get a binary map out of it and so I’ve tried both. And they’re both very nice for an overall look, for sure. And easy. Here’s my comments and thoughts. Things I tried and funny things I found. So Ann talks about creating the geography list, and you can go, um, tag a list of countries or states, hit the geography button, and then you get a list that looks like this one [00:04:00] that has some little symbol before each country name.

But I discovered I accidentally had, because Excel always wants you to put the labels and the data in before it’ll give you a chart, I did. And what I came up with, for some reason Canada and India came up, their counts came up with a ward in Kolkata in India. I don’t know why. So when I took that off and just made it plain data back to what it is on the bottom left, then it was fine.

So I used the plain data, I went to more map charts, that’s where you get the world map view, but you only get that one map. So you can do it with or without the geography designation, meaning if you just have a list, don’t worry about defining it as geography. This is a version I did do with Geography. So, this is one of the two I showed you, and this is the default color scheme.

Here’s the variations. It gives you these three variations only, [00:05:00] and it gives you these three color variations, or these several color variations, but you can’t mix and match. You can’t, you have to choose them, and then it defines the grades automatically. And these are the only choices you have, um, the, the top and bottom are automatically ticked.

When I tick data labels, then I got the data labels, but you can see I got them in very few countries. Not that I expect a U. S. map on PowerPoint to be able to show, I mean a world map, to be able to show everything there is, uh, in 79 countries, especially some that are very small, like in Europe. And then We talked about going back to the tile world map, and Ann wanted, um, had helped me put the numbers in.

She helped me correct the formula. We figured out how to do this. This came from John Schwabisch, who Ann was talking about a few minutes ago. And Ann helped me get the formula for the data labels. So the data [00:06:00] labels come right next to the country name, which was in there. The way John has it set up and something’s locked down because I can’t change a color if I move things.

There’s a whole formula of how, a process of how I had to paste things next door to the one I wanted to put in and then paste it again to get, to, to not get a change in color and to get the right name of the country. For my audience, they won’t be necessarily familiar with a tile map. This is, you know, if someone told you this is the world, you might see it, but without telling you, I think it’s still really awkward, even though it’s appealing to me to have every country name labeled, and for people to be able to pick out their countries easily, which we can’t do on a general world map.

So I did try and, uh, sort of an overlay of a world map, um, and tried to see if that would be better. [00:07:00] It, I couldn’t get it underneath the Excel grid, obviously, so the overlay is making things very light and I couldn’t, the one thing I wanted to do is to try to highlight around each cell where there was a country represented, make that white or somehow make it stand out so you could see in the whole map.

No matter what continent you were in, you could see a certain designation for where the countries are. But even with this, I wouldn’t use this for, uh, really much of any reason. Here are my challenges. I mentioned some of them. You can’t change the tile colors in the dark gray and the dark green. It’s really hard to read, uh, the writing in it.

No matter whether I chose, it was black, I chose white, it’s still hard to read it. There’s a stepped process I had to do to add new country data labels, so I can’t update this automatically. I could, the Excel one, I could do more quickly because it’s just a list of names and the counts that I got from [00:08:00] the pivot table.

But this is the three step process, Ann, I would have had to do. So let me show you my preference. I’m going to go over each one as it’s independent. The tile map, this is the tile map that does have numbers in it, and I was able to bold those numbers where people were represented from their country. But it’s hard to understand.

It’s a world map. It’s hard to make, and it’s hard to update. The Excel map, slightly blurry I know, but the Excel map is easy to understand that it’s a world map. It was pretty easy to make, but there weren’t many adjustments I could make, and it was limited for me. And then the Google map, where the countries are already labeled for me, and most of them will stay in, and people can probably pick themselves out pretty easily, even at the, uh, Map level.

For me, that’s the, [00:09:00] that was the one that had the most adjustments. You could change the marker, uh, color. I like the gray because it helped, um, against the green. And this is where I went. I’m probably just going to go back to this if I do a map in the infographic for the end of this year. And I’m just wanting to show you all.

This is how easy it is. You go to this place, you create a new map, and, um, I will put this link in the chat for anybody who’s interested in it, but I think I’ve exercised in all three mapping options to the extent that I could. And definitely I looked at the return on investment for how much time it would take me to do something or not.

So I’m, I am going to share the recording with Jon cause I want him to see what we’ve done with this with your help. So that’s everything. Thank you so much for sharing behind the scenes of your thought process. You [00:10:00] went through so many different types of maps. Um, this one that this tool I was not aware of, people had told me about this, but I hadn’t actually seen the screenshot of this before.

In map making terms, we call it a pin drop map, like if you’ve ever gone to a restaurant or a national park and you put the physical pin in of where you’re from. This is really nice for city level data, in particular, would be at strongpoint. I think the fact that it can do that Shading to show the amount is really promising too.

Um, I totally agree with you that kind of like the regular map with the gradients because you can’t really label all the countries or I don’t know. It’s just, it’s a lot of detail that maybe you don’t even need. I’m still a fan for you of the binary map. Just showing where people were from or not. But again, I’m an outsider to your data.

So for me, I’m like, wow, look at all these different countries that are [00:11:00] represented that Sue gets to work with all these different people. And for me, that’s, that’s so amazing. But for you, that might be like, yeah, duh. I know that that’s old news and you might need a higher level of detail. Um, the tile grid maps, they’re so promising for, I think, small Smaller geographies, but again, like the world map, like you said, what are people even looking at?

Okay, can I give you a homework assignment in all your spare time to try next? More homework? Absolutely. Um, the overlay, the overlay was so promising. I saw one, I saved it on LinkedIn, I saw this two days ago, I, uh, Shelley C., who I should be connected to, I guess, I’m not following, I don’t know her last name, uh, I guess she made this?

Yeah, at the Associated Press. This is kind of an overlay, right? This is, can you see how this is similar to what you had? It’s Electoral College Units. Not quite tiles, uh, [00:12:00] not an icon array. Stacks? Icon stacks, I think would be the technical name for this. All of us Dataviz people disagree what these are called.

Um, over top of the map. So there might, there might be some type of overlay with yours that could work. I wouldn’t rule that out. So in all your spare time, if you fiddle with the formatting there and get anything promising, let me know. I’d love to see if that could be developed further. Well, this is intriguing because it also gives you the numbers.

You know, it’s kind of like a waffle chart made in the form of the states, um, the states outline. But anyway, so I did all the work for people to know what their choices are so far. This, I will say for me, it’s got to be free. It’s got to be relatively quick. I agree the binary map does when I made it. I was like, oh, wow, that’s great.

But I’m also wanting to share at the end of [00:13:00] this year, I’ll probably write everybody from every course and just say, just want you to be able to see how many people from your country and things like that, just so people Recognize. Because there are some countries where in Africa and Asia that I’ve had a lot of folks, Nigeria and India primarily, but lots of Europeans, lots of, I’m getting many more U.

S. folks now, which I didn’t the first two years. Thank you for all your encouragement.

You might need text boxes for annotations or labels.

You might spend a few moments adding and editing the text box.

But then, it doesn’t get pasted correctly into Word or PowerPoint, argh!

In this 5-minute video, you’ll see 2 ways to add text boxes to Excel charts:

1. The sloooow way (adding a text box outside the chart, and then having to do extra editing and grouping)
2. The speedy way (being proactive and adding a text box inside the chart from the beginning)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgoPvIHWuJA

What’s Inside

• 0:00 The problem: Text boxes don’t get copied/pasted into Word or PowerPoint correctly
• 1:02 Dataviz on the Go
• 1:12 Example: Text boxes on small multiples histograms
• 1:55 The long, hard way: Text box is a separate object from the chart
• 2:59 The fix: “Group” separate objects together
• 4:18 The better, faster way: Click on the chart first!
• 5:10 Additional benefits: No grouping; No border; No removing white fill color
• 5:31 Recap

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] In this video, I’m going to show you how to add text boxes to your graph. Like this.

You might need to add some labels. You might want to add some call out boxes or annotations.

But then I’m also going to show you the correct way to do this because I want your text boxes to come along for the ride as you copy and paste your graph into Word or PowerPoint.

Here’s the problem, right? You add these beautiful text boxes and then you copy and you go into word and you paste and you’re like, where are they?

And people tell me, “oh, I had to take a screenshot.” No screenshots. That is low resolution. It gets blurry. It looks unprofessional. No screenshots. Okay.

Or they say, “I had to copy and paste all of my text boxes separately.” So they’re doing copy, paste, copy, paste like 10 bajillion times. I don’t want that for you either.

I want you to save time. All right. So in this video, I’m going to show you how to add the text boxes the correct way so that they come along into [00:01:00] Word or PowerPoint with the rest of your graph.

I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel.

And speaking of being on the go, I was teaching dataviz in South Africa a few days ago. Uh, the jet lag is mostly gone by now.

And we were looking at how to make column histograms. We were also making area histograms, and we were also making small multiples histograms.

And when we got to the text box section, I was reminded again, that a lot of people don’t know this trick, so that’s why I wanted to make a video about it to share this with more people like you.

All right, let me show you how to add the text boxes, what not to do. Or how to fix it in case you’re doing it the long, hard way.

And then I’m going to show you what to do. The yes version second. Okay.

What not to do? Let me delete these text boxes and I’m going to read them [00:02:00] in case this is new to you. Oops, oops, oops, too far, too far. Click the undo arrow, delete this little one.

Okay. What not to do? Insert. Find your text box. It lives under shapes. It’s also on the far right of your screen. Very similar to PowerPoint and Word, right? You add your text box and you’re like, wait, I thought you were going to tell us what not to do. Here’s what not to do. You like, you, you add your text box, you draw it where you want it, you add all your words, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It would look something like this over on the side. You would remove the border from it. And then you’re like, great, I’m all done. I’m going to copy. And I’m going to paste and where is it? Where is it? Right? So what happened is your chart and your text box are separate objects. So you’d have to copy paste them individually.

Gross, right? [00:03:00] So if this has happened to you, the fix is just group them. You’ve probably done grouping in PowerPoint where you click on your chart and then you hold down. Is it control or shift? I never look at my keyboard. I just do it by muscle memory. It’s either control or shift. Let’s try control. Yeah, control work.

Did shift also work? Select, hold down shift, select. Okay. It’s both control or shift. I have no idea what the Mac keyboard shortcut is, but if you do comment below the video, share the Mac shortcut for selecting multiple objects with us. So we all know, okay. You’d have both of these selected. You hover your mouse over the border, right?

Not, not so it looks like this shape, but so that it looks like the little arrow shape. You right click and you group and then they are one object. Your two separate objects have turned into one object. They move together, the [00:04:00] location stays there, and then they also can be Copied and pasted together. Okay, now when you paste it, it’s like it’s there.

It’s not formatted, but it’s there. Um, so that works if you accidentally you’re like, where’s the text box? Just group them. Better case scenario that I want you to get in to the gist of doing. I think this saves time in the long run is just proactively trap your text box inside your chart. If you are clicked on some random cell and you insert a text box, your text box is just going to show up like separate.

It’s going to be a separate object, okay? Because you’re just clicked on something else. And then you’re going to have to group them. Just click on your chart first. Click on your chart. It’s activated. Get into the habit of doing that. Go to insert. You add your text box, right? You draw it where you want it.

Right here, for example, and then it’s automatically [00:05:00] inside. So when you copy and paste you don’t have to do group You don’t have to get stressed. It’s just there. It’s there exactly where you need it It also doesn’t add the little border around so I feel like it saves like yet a little more time. It also is Transparent and clear where this one is accidentally covering up the chart in the gridlines.

So Maybe it’s like Three time savers. Not having to group, not having to remove the border, and not having to remove the white fill color. So to recap, click on your chart first, then add your text box. It’s going to be trapped inside. You don’t have to do any extra editing later on.

Is your chart…

• Too wide?
• Too narrow?
• Bars are too short?
• Weird white space?
• Labels not showing?
• Labels wrapped funny?

If so, it’s probably the outside and/or inside border.

If you’re not sure what I mean by outside and inside border, stick around! This video is for you.