Excel 365: Customize Charts & Trendlines

Course description

Customizing charts in Excel 365 allows users to transform standard visuals into powerful communication tools that highlight patterns, comparisons, and forecasts. This course introduces techniques for refining charts beyond their default settings, ensuring that they effectively convey insights. Learners will begin by exploring chart filters, which allow categories or series to be shown or hidden without altering the underlying dataset or affecting other charts. From there, the course covers formatting options, including pre-made chart styles, color schemes, manual adjustments, and element-specific formatting, such as axes, legends, and chart backgrounds. Users will then learn how to create dual axis charts (combo charts), which are especially useful when comparing values on vastly different scales, such as percentages and totals. The course also demonstrates how to apply and customize trendlines, enabling learners to forecast future values and visualize ongoing trends within data. Additional lessons explain how to save frequently used formatting as chart templates, making it easy to apply a consistent style across multiple workbooks. Finally, the course introduces sparklines, compact visuals embedded directly into cells, which provide quick at-a-glance trends without requiring a full chart. Together, these skills give users the ability to build highly customized, professional-quality visuals that go beyond basic charts. By mastering these tools, learners will be able to present data more effectively, highlight key insights, and support decision-making with clear, tailored visuals.

Course outline