By Allen Wyatt for Excel.Tips.Net
Using Graphics to Represent Excel Data Series
Excel is great at creating all sorts of charts from your data. You can even customize the charts to your heart’s content. One of the customizations you can make is to replace the regular bars (in a bar chart) with your own graphics. For instance, you might have a small graphic of a house that you want to use for the bars. This could be great if you wanted to used “stacked” houses to represent, for instance, housing starts in an area.
To use your own graphics in place of Excel’s built-in bars, follow these steps:
1. Create your bar chart as usual.
2. Right click on one of the data series bars in the chart. Excel displays a Context menu.
3. Choose Format Data Series from the Context menu. Excel displays the Format Data Series dialog box.
4. Make sure the Fill option is selected at the left of the dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
