Formatting the Border of a Legend

This is a late answer for "The Bruce", but I thought some of my special approaches might be useful to others.

I'm often at odds with Excel charting. While it's very powerful, it can also be very constraining in certain situations.

When that happens, I creatively apply other methods Excel provides.

- When Excel can't format axis titles quite the way I want them (perhaps I want to color, italicize or bold part of the title), I turn off the chart axis title and put axis title in the cells behind the chart. By adjusting row heights, column widths and merging cells, I can usually get exactly what I need.

- Ditto for chart titles.

- When I can't get the chart legend the way I want, I create my own. I've used MS Paint to build a chart legend image and then pasted it as a picture over the chart. I've also used text boxes. This can be especially handy when your chart includes a ghost series or two that you don't want in the chart legend. Sometimes, I've used snip to copy Excel's chart legend which I then edited with MS Paint and then pasted as a picture over the chart.

- I've also set up bar charts so that each bar aligns with it's own Excel column or row (column for a vertical bar chart, row for a horizontal bar chart) and then inserted the bar names into the appropriate cells.

- One special note -- when I put legends and titles in cells under a chart, I format the chart area to have no borders and no color. Instead, I color the cells under the chart and apply a suitable border.

By now, some readers may be shaking their heads at these techniques. Admittedly, I don't use them often. But they sure come in handy in those special cases where they're needed. And in my 25 years of using Excel, those special cases have come up pretty often.

Do you know of a way to format a legend so that the series color dot is larger and placed above the legend text rather than to the left and relatively small as is the standard? (see Figure 1 below)