Custom Labels in Excel's X-Y Scatter Plots--Phew!

Courtesy of ISB MBA student Prem Pasupathy (many thanks Prem! I've struggled with this significantly....)

Dear Professor,

I did some research on assigning a custom data label to data points in XY Scatter Graph. What I found was that it is possible to change the default label given by xls (i.e. the x or y value) by manually clicking on each data point and typing in a new text. After doing this in Chart Options dialog, the “Automatic Text” option appears.

After searching for some add-ins in xls that can do this automatically, I came across the following site: http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=209#jon013).

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Using Text in Cells for Data Labels

Excel lets you apply data labels to each point in a series, with options to use the Y values or the X labels in the data labels (pie charts allow a few other options as well). You can manually change each label, but what if you want to use a range of cells in your worksheet as data labels for your chart series? There are a couple useful and free Excel add-ins that can automatically label data points, using labels in a worksheet range:

1. John Walkenbach's Chart Tools

http://www.j-walk.com/ss/excel/files/charttools.htm

2. Rob Bovey's Chart Labeler

http://appspro.com/Utilities/ChartLabeler.htm

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The above mentioned tools are free and can be plugged into xls as an add-in. I tried out both of them and found it very easy to assign the labels. I hope this information will be useful to you.

Thanks,

Prem Pasupathy

Class of 2007

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