Text boxes are clunky and time-consuming.

Instead, we’ll create Helper Cells with concatenated values.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:33 Dataviz On The Go
• 0:42 Why not text boxes??
• 1:42 Pie example
• 5:42 Donut example
• 7:42 Bar example
• 12:28 Advanced: Nested IF with left, mid, right
• 14:42 Your turn

Materials

Download the Excel file: https://depictdatastudio.ck.page/numbersandpercentagesingraphlabels

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] How do you put numbers and percentages inside your graph labels? In this video, you’re going to learn how to do this.
We’re going to go through two different workarounds, three different chart types, so you’ll know how to do this for pies, for donuts, for bar charts.
And you can also download the Excel file that I’m using. Just look below the video, you’ll see a link to download it for free. Obviously, you’re going to learn more if you follow along with me and you do it yourself, that’s going to be way better than just watching me do it, which would be really boring too.
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 in South Africa just a few days ago teaching dataviz and one of the participants there raised his hand and he was like, Ann, How do I add the numbers and the percentages inside my chart labels? And I walked over to his laptop and he showed me a [00:01:00] column chart that he had.
It had about 10 different columns going across and he had numbers and percentages and I was like, you already did it. What do I need to help you with? And he was like, well, but then it was text boxes manually put on each of those 10 columns, which must’ve taken him like 10 minutes to do, right? That’s way too much time.
Um, he was explaining how. When he updated the data each month, the text box location didn’t change with the height of the column. So he had to manually adjust the placement and that’s way too much work. So I’m not going to show you how to do this with text boxes. I’m going to show you the better way behind the scenes.
It involves a little bit of a learning curve, but I guarantee you in the long run, it’s going to be way faster. All right. Open up your Excel file if you haven’t already, and let’s go through each of these chart types together. So what you’re going to do along with me is you’re going to highlight the gray section of the table.
It’s a little counterintuitive. You might be tempted to highlight the numbers and the percents. [00:02:00] We’re just going to do the numbers. You’re going to go to Insert, and we’re going to add a 2D pie chart. Okay. These are the default settings that Microsoft gives us, and we’re going to make it look like this one over here.
If you have questions about big A accessibility or little A accessibility, just comment below the video and I will certainly point you in the right direction. I have hundreds of blog posts and YouTube videos and conference presentations all about accessibility in dataviz. This video is just about the labels, so I’m going to try to hold back from talking too much about the formatting and just show you the number percentage combo here.
Okay, so how you do this is you click on any one of the pie slices here, do a right click, add data labels. Then you click on the labels, any one of them, right click, [00:03:00] format data labels. Labels are kind of annoying because you have to add them and then you have to format them. It’s not my choice. That’s just how it is.
It feels like a little more work though, doesn’t it? Right? Add format. When you click format, it’s going to pull up the sidebar and you’re just going to click the percentage box. That’s basically it. The value, a number in this case, and the percentage. There are a few more formatting things that you’re probably going to want to do while we’re in here.
For example, you can add the category name. Okay. So it looks like We’re not going to do the iZigZag, which is also not colorblind friendly or grayscale friendly. We don’t do legends in dataviz. I’m going to delete this built in chart title for now. Okay, it’s getting a little closer to the model right here.
And let me go back to that format menu. We did category, we did value, we did percentage. I’m going to uncheck leader lines. Those [00:04:00] are little gray connecting lines that show up sometimes if you manually drag the label too far away, they just add clutter. I’m going to delete those. The separator. Right now, it’s category, comma, number, comma, percentage.
I’m going to do new line. And the label position, I’m going to put outside end. You might have to manually drag things just a little bit, like maybe you’d have to shrink down your pie chart. Here I am showing you all the edits when I promised myself I wouldn’t, but I didn’t want this one to be cut off, right?
Okay, and then the final thing you might want to do is maybe you make the word Colored and bold. So how you do that, I’ll zoom in to make sure you can see exactly where I’m clicking, cause it’s really small, right? When you click on the label, it looks like nothing happened. You kind of have to like click a couple of times and then depending on where your mouse is, a different section is going to be dark gray.
Can you see that? It’s just, it’s such a slight difference, like a medium gray [00:05:00] versus a light gray. Do you see that? You like, right? The one that’s a little bit darker. So the one that’s a little bit darker, the category label, you can, you have to like, Oh, it’s so hard to click on the right spot. You have to highlight it, highlight the word you have, and then you can make just the word colored.
To match the slice it corresponds to, right? To remove guesswork. And colored font should be bold to make sure it passes accessibility standards. You go through it again, right? Double click on just that first one. Highlight it. That one’s gonna be that second theme color. And bold, etc, etc. Same thing on donut charts.
Okay. Scroll down on your spreadsheet. Let’s practice this again so that it feels more fluent for you. You highlight just the number, you go to insert, you pick out your chart type. Let’s do a 2D donut. If you highlight percentage, if you’re like, duh, [00:06:00] I’ll just do it this way. I’m just going to do it better or something or different.
Um, it’s not going to work. It’s going to show you this nested donut where it has the numbers and then the percentages. And that’s weird. Why would you want your chart to look like that? Okay. We don’t want that. We want just a regular old donut chart. That’s how you highlight just the numbers. You’re going to add the labels and then format them.
So you click on the slices or wedges of the donut, right click, add, click on the labels, right click, format, very similar menu as before. Click category. You’ve got value already. Click percentage, uncheck leader lines, change the separator. We’ll do new line and then Can you place them outside? No, you can’t.
Isn’t that annoying? So you have to manually Right. There’s not the position or location section down here. I just manually drag them, you know, just like a little bit [00:07:00] kind of over here. And then sometimes I get frustrated that this takes a while, but it takes about this long. Delete this part. You’d make it colored, probably delete this, et cetera.
Right. There’s a little bit more formatting to do. You might have to like, I just can’t help but format this for you. Anyway, that’s why I have the completed version. So you can see up to Ann Emery standards, what it should look like. So, pies and donuts. Pretty easy, right? You add the labels, you format them, and you look for the little square checkbox that says percentage.
Pretty darn easy, behind the scenes. Bar charts. They’re a little bit different. We need the second workaround for these. So, for bar charts, we are going to highlight the gray area Just like before, go to insert. This should look familiar, right? Let’s add a 2D bar chart like this, but we want it to look like the number and the [00:08:00] percent.
We can try, we can try the same thing. It’s not going to work, right? Click on the bars, right click, add data labels. Click on the labels. Right click. Format. Where’s the percentage checkbox? It’s not there. That percentage checkbox is only there for pies and donuts. It’s not there for bar charts and a bunch of other chart types.
So we have to use that second workaround. And the workaround is gonna be Helper cells.
We are going to type in exactly what we want here and then whatever is sitting in these cells is going to feed in here. Okay.
Just for kicks, I’ll show you what, uh, what these do. Click on your labels, right click, format. Pulls up the window. Value from cells. This is one of my [00:09:00] favorite boxes. Click that. Ignore this little pop up for a second. All you do is you highlight your helper cells, you click okay, and it shows you the helper cells, comma, the value.
So here is hi at the top of the table, that is hi down there, right? Here is I’m and there’s I’m down there and the value. But you wouldn’t keep this, you would do a little more formatting of course, like you would just remove the value and the leader lines. You can type in whatever there. And it feeds into the label.
Isn’t that nice? So if you want number percent, should I show you the long way? Uh, I’ll show you the long way. And then the short way you could manually, this is a long way. You could manually type in. Uh, this, and then it shows up right there. Whatever’s in the helper cell [00:10:00] goes over there. Now, am I going to tell you to manually type stuff in?
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You’re going to do a concatenation. You’re going to say equals this and. This ampersand, it is really smushed. It’s the number smush the percent altogether. It’s two, two, four, two, and then it’s 0. 384. It’s all these digits from this division, right? From the numerator and denominator living here behind the scenes.
So you go back in and edit this. If you’ve seen concatenation before, you know how to do this, right? If you’re new to concatenation. Welcome. Hopefully this opens up a whole new world for you of formatting control that you have for your dataviz behind the scenes. Formatting for this would be like, um, what would we have to do?
The number and, uh, quotes. Open parentheses, whoops, quotes, space, open [00:11:00] parentheses, quotes, and the B61 and C61, those are specific locations. Those do not get quotes, but everything else does get quotes. So if I want space, open parentheses, it has to have double quotes around it. And then everything’s just separated by the ampersand, okay?
Number, space, parentheses, percent. It’s not going to be perfect, but we’re getting closer. Number space, open parentheses percent. And you just go back through and you edit it again and again. So let’s add this, uh, let’s do a times a hundred and then we’re going to round this to a decimal place and we’re going to add what else?
Percentage symbol, closing parentheses. Okay, we’re getting closer and closer. Because I do this for a living and I’m very, very picky about my graph labels, I would also go through and do [00:12:00] one more layer of editing where I add the comma, the thousands separator comma, and I would do that using a nested if and left mid and right.
But, That really deserves another video. If you want though, you can look in this answer key and the formula that you’re going to see is going to be much longer because I have nested if and left mid right. Okay. What if, speaking of if, uh, another variation would be what if you have like a Big digits, right?
Like these are little digits, three and four digit numbers. If you have big, big, big digits, like currency, I work on a lot of grant making projects with foundations. They have things like project amounts and they’re often in the millions or tens of millions, sometimes. Same idea where you’d add some helper cells.
This is actually, here’s a really long, there’s, this [00:13:00] nested, if left, mid, right. It gets a lot longer. And the same idea, you could just highlight, insert your bar chart. Does this look familiar now? That’s why I want to show it to you twice. Add the labels, right click, whoops, got to click on them, right click, format, value from cells, select the helper cells you would have made.
Okay, uncheck, uncheck value, uncheck leader lines, and then you do a little bit more formatting so it would look something like this. One downside to using concatenated helper cells is the labels are all the same format. So you can’t make just the number bold and purple or just the percentage. It’s all or nothing.
Um, so I, I don’t love that, but you know, it’s like that, of course there are variations of this, right? Like if you have like really, really, really big numbers, things [00:14:00] like in the millions, you could also write longer formulas, if statements with left, mid and right, so that something like 123 just says 123 K or millions might say 1.
27 M for million. And then your finished version could look, you know, something like this, right? It’s really, really hard to do that, uh, with text boxes. It’s really clunky. You might make typos. You have to manually adjust it all the time. And you can’t just right click and check, check the percentage box.
So I hope that the concatenation, even though there’s a little bit of a learning curve, I think it’s going to save you a lot of time in the end. All right, it’s your turn. Let me know what types of questions you run into. Let me know if you apply it and how this works in your data set.

The post How to Put Numbers AND Percentages in Graph Labels in Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

There’s a misconception that accessibility takes all day, that’s it’s costly, or that it’s complicated. Those are all false.

Accessibility is woven into all my trainings, but since this is a topic I get asked about a lot, I decided to make a new talk that’s focused just on accessibility for dataviz.

In Spring 2021 I gave a talk at the Good Tech Fest conference about dataviz accessibility quick wins.

The talk was a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style where the audience chose what we discussed from a list of options. They chose:

• direct labels,
• lower the reading level, and
• lower the numeracy level.

You can watch the recording or read the highlights. Enjoy!

—–

Watch the Conversation

Here’s the main takeaway message: remove legends and directly label instead.

You probably know what a legend is, but direct labeling? What is that?

Let’s look at an example of a regular (inaccessible) graph.

Why Traditional Legends Don’t Work

When I saw this graph a few years ago, I actually liked most aspects of it.

I really liked the title in particular, and how it was phrased as a question, which gets the audience to engage. Two thumbs up to the title, “What happened to women in computer science?”

Legends Take Too Long to Read

But then I kept reading a little bit and I was like, “Wait a second… Time out.”

In full color I could mostly tell which section of the legend corresponded with which line. The turquoise lines were tricky because it’s hard figure out which is dark, which is medium, and which is lightest. Your eyes zig–zag back and forth trying to differentiate between the three. It’s really time-consuming.

Legends Don’t Work for Grayscale Printing

So it works in color, kind of, but what about grayscale printing?

Some people will view our graphs on-screen. Others will print them.

And if they’re printing the graphs, we should plan for grayscale printing. Colored ink is so expensive.

It doesn’t work at all.

Legends Don’t Work for People with Color Vision Deficiencies

What about color blindness?

If somebody has a color vision deficiency and can’t differentiate between red and green, the lines would all look yellow.

Traditional legends don’t work; they’re a thing of the past.

So what to do instead?

Directly Label the Graphs

We’re going to directly label our graphs.

What does that mean?

Direct labeling means you put the labels as close as physically possible to the data.

In this line chart, you’d just add the labels off to the side of the line.

Direct labels are:

• Faster for everyone to read (less eye zig-zagging)
• Grayscale-friendly
• Colorblind-friendly

A win-win-win!

Bonus points if you color-code the text to match the line it is labeling. (Red text for a red line, turquoise text for a turquoise line, and so on.)

How to Label Pie Charts

We’ve looked at line charts.

So, how do we label a pie chart?

Friendly reminder: Pie charts aren’t evil. They can be used as long as you follow the rule of two: you’re only allowed two slices in your pie. Maaaaybe three. The dark slice will be what you want the viewers to really look at, versus everything else in gray. Simple, right?

But we still need to directly label them, and it’s as easy as putting the labels as close as physically possible to their slices.

For example, if you have short labels, you can place the labels on top of the pie slices.

Now it’s speedier for people to read, it’s legible in grayscale, and it’s even legible for people with color vision deficiencies.

A question I get a lot is, “But if I have really long labels?” I know most of us aren’t comparing A to B.

If you have long labels, you can put your labels outside of the pie charts.

Bonus points again if you color-code the labels to the corresponding slices.

How to Label Donut Charts

Here’s another scenario for you with donuts. You’ve seen these, right? They’re just a pie chart with a hole punched in the middle.

They have the same rules as pie charts: two slices (max), with one dark slice versus everything else.

But, it’s really hard to fit any labels on top of donut segments. So how do you label these?

You have three options:

1. Outside of the donut segments
2. Inside the donut itself
3. Beside the donut

How to Label Bar Charts

Have you ever seen this, where Excel gives a legend that reads something like ‘Series1’?

This is confusing for viewers. To fix it, all you need to do is delete the legend.

How to Label Clustered Bar Charts

If your bars are long enough, you can place the labels on top of the bars, like this.

No need to label every single bar. Teach the viewers how to read the chart by labeling the top bars. Then, let them read the rest on their own.

During the Good Test Fest talk, an audience member asked how I added those labels.

You can:

• Add text boxes on top of the bars (beware: clunky and time-consuming)
• Use fancier automation techniques (e.g., concatenating the words and numbers together, a technique from this course)

How to Label Clustered Column Charts

I’m not a fan of putting the labels on the columns. The labels would need to be rotated vertically, which takes longer to read than horizontal labels.  

I typically use horizontal clustered bar charts to allow for horizontal labels, which are the fastest to read.

Download the eBook

Want to learn more about accessible data visualization?

In this ebook, you’ll learn 10 quick wins for designing accessible data visualizations. These small edits can have a big impact for our coworkers, board members, and funders who have color vision deficiencies, hearing loss, or learning disabilities–and for all of us who are pressed for time.

For your complimentary copy, use code: goodtechfest

The post Accessibility Quick Wins: Remove Legends and Directly Label appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

First, set up your data table:

Highlight the entire data table (A1 through H3), go to the Insert tab, and click on the line chart icon.

You’ll get a 1990s-era default line chart:

Do some basic formatting.

Adjust the y-axis so that the grid lines don’t appear quite so often (e.g., every 50 units rather than every 20 units).

Apply a custom color palette (colors that match the organization’s look and feel rather than Excel’s blue and orange).

You might even add light gray tick marks along the x-axis.

Now let’s add labels.

Click anywhere along the line, just once, and you’ll see little circles on top of each data point:

Right-click on top of one of those circular data points.

You’ll see a pop-up window.

Click on Add Data Labels.

Your unformatted labels will appear to the right of each data point:

Click just once on any of those data labels. You’ll see little squares around each data point.

Then, right-click on any of those data labels. You’ll see a pop-up menu. Select Format Data Labels.

In the Format Data Labels editing window, adjust the Label Position.

By default the labels appear to the right of each data point.

Click on Center so that the labels appear right on top of each point.

Umm yeah. So the labels are totally unreadable because they’ve got a line running through them.

Click on the labels again so that a square appears around the outside of the labels. Go to Shape Fill (the paint can icon) and fill each label with a white background.

Then, do the same thing to the orange line: Add data labels. Adjust the label position so that the labels are centered on top of each data point. Finally, fill the label with white so that the text is legible.

Easy, right?!

Continue formatting a bit more. You might enlarge the label text and make that text bold so that it stands out against the gray axis labels. I often adjust the label colors so that the labels match the line (maroon numbers to match the maroon line, orange numbers to match the orange line).

To add the Organization A and Organization B text, I would *usually* click Format Data Labels and check the box next to Series Name. In this example, that doesn’t quite work; you’ll need to manually add two text boxes.

The post How to Place Labels Directly Through Your Line Graph in Microsoft Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Take a simple line graph, for example.

How will you label your line graph?

With vertical axis labels and light gray grid lines? With labels directly above or on top of the data points? A mix of both?

Here are four styles to consider.

Option A: Label the vertical axis

The first option is to simply label your vertical y-axis: 0, 25, 50, 75, 100, and so on.

The trick is strike a balance between labeling too frequently and not frequently enough. In this fictional scenario, I used increments of 25. The increments you choose will likely depend on your unique dataset.

Then, lighten (mute) the grid lines. Thin gray lines > thick black lines. We need our viewers to focus on the star of the show — the burgundy and orange lines — and not get sidetracked by the backup dancers — the supplemental information like grid lines and tick marks.

I use this style when I want viewers to focus on the general, big-picture view. Is the line generally going up or going down? Where are the peaks and valleys over time?

The viewers won’t see the exact values. In other words, my spreadsheet will tell me that Organization A had a 130 in 2009. But my viewers can only estimate that value.

The viewers’ takeaway message might be, “Organization A’s values are always above Organization B’s values. Both organizations have higher numbers in 2015 compared to 2009. Organization A started around 125 and went up to the 175-200 range, and Organization B started in the 25-50 range, got as high as the 100-125 range, but then went back down to the 75-100 range. And what the heck happened to Organization B between 2014 and 2015?”

Sometimes I add markers (those little circles on top of the lines).

I include markers when I want my viewers to remember that each point represents a different point in time. Rather than the smoothed-out appearance in the line above, this style subtly emphasizes that there gains and losses over time. Make sure your markers are relatively small; otherwise, the graph can look outdated and clunky.

Option B: Label all of the data points directly

A second option is to remove the axis and label the data points directly.

Direct labeling means placing the labels as close to the data as possible. In this case, the numeric labels go right above, or on top of, the data points. We’re aiming for physical proximity.

You might choose to place the labels directly above the lines. However, this style tends to get a bit cluttered, especially when there are more than two lines per graph, or if you have lots of points in time to display.

To avoid some clutter, I often center the numeric labels directly on top of each data point:

Or, you might center the numeric labels directly on top of circular markers.

Meh.

The circles need to be pretty large to fit two-digit and three-digit labels. And if my labels included percentage signs, then the circles would need to be even larger.

This style gets clunky fast. It reminds me of something I would draw in elementary school. Feel free to disagree… I don’t have research to back this up. It’s just my personal aesthetic preference.

Option C: Label both the vertical axis and data points

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

This style is overkill. Information overload. Super cluttered.

Axis labels help viewers estimate the numbers. Data labels help viewers see the exact numbers. Do your viewers need estimates or exact numbers? Put on your thinking cap and choose one or the other.

Label the axes, or the data points, but not both.

This chart would score poorly on the Labels Are Used Sparingly section of the Data Visualization Checklist.

Option D: Label just a couple points along the line

Finally, a fourth option is to only label a few points along the line.
You might label the beginning and end points. Or, you might label a specific year or two. For example, you might be telling a story about what happened in 2012 specifically. If so, you could label the 2012 point only.

This style helps you avoid information overload and is often preferred among laypeople viewers who want the big-picture, birds-eye-view of information. If your viewers are researchers or data scientists who love seeing alllll the raw data, I wouldn’t recommend this style.

You might forego the vertical axis labels:

Or, you might include the vertical axis labels:

Which styles do you use most often? Which styles do you prefer?

The post Axis Labels, Numeric Labels, or Both? Line Graph Styles to Consider appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Notice anything funny about the height of these bars?

The shortest bar, for 2012, represents 26,000 youth. But the tallest bar, for 2010, represents 27,000 youth. 26,000 and 27,000 are pretty similar numbers, yet they look reeaaaallllly different. The 26,000 seemed way too short compared to the 27,000.

This graph’s vertical y-axis doesn’t start at zero, so the differences between bar heights are exaggerated.

It’s okay to have a non-zero y-axis. But, it must be labeled.

In the after version, I added labels for 25,600, 26,000, 26,400, and so on.

We don’t want to mislead our viewers. We have to be clear that we’ve intentionally truncated that y-axis so that we could zoom in on that segment between 26,000 and 27,000.

Or, another option is to adjust your vertical y-axis so that it starts at zero.

Then, you wouldn’t need to have any axis labels off to the left of your graph.

The tradeoff is that, now, the bars are all roughly the same height… which might be okay, depending on what you want to emphasize. Maybe you’re trying to show that a consistent number of youth were enrolled in the study sample each year. In that case, starting the y-axis at zero would help you out.

Let’s look at those two “after” versions once more.

Option A, on the top right: If you’re going to start your y-axis at something other than zero, then you need to add axis labels.

Option B, on the bottom right: You can start your axis at zero and forego having any labels.

How have you handled truncated y-axes in your projects?

The post Be Careful with the Y-Axis… appeared first on Depict Data Studio.