How to Change Excel Data Label Color?
Welcome back, it’s another Mr. Excel netcast, I’m Bill Jelen. Today’s questions sent in by Wang and I have been beating my head against the wall on this one all day. I got to tell you. I have to Congratulate Wang, he discovered something pretty unusual here and create a pie chart from this and we’ll add some data labels in so layout data labels, more data label options, category name, value percentage and I want them outside and there we go, click close.
Alright Wang wanted part of one label to be in a different color. So if you’re out to do that which is cool and not many people would be that tenacious, change that font color so it looks good and some only matters to highlight that one piece of it but check out what happens to the chart and I’m going to change that value from 444 to 999.
So click okay and sure enough the pie slice got larger but check out the label. The label is now stock. It won’t update and that the deal here is once you update part of a label it then becomes static it won’t change, it’s not automatic and what we’ll find in Excel 2003 you would format the data series, here we want to format the data labels and there’s something here called reset label text in 2003. It was called auto format or auto text.
So when we reset it sure enough it does fix it but then you lose the red every time. Alright so I said well, there has to be a way to do this and so I went to the macro recorder and try to say all right let’s set it back to auto text and then take the first six characters here and change in the red. Well, the problem is in Excel 2007 the macro record doesn’t work.
Over here on this computer Excel 2010 guess what the macro recorded does work gives us code that A doesn’t work in 2007 and B because that’s a beta over there. It doesn’t give us code that works in 2010 either. I reported that bug to Microsoft and maybe 2010 will be fixed when they actually come out. Remember right now we’re just kind of stuck without a good solution here, very, very frustrating. I think one out there has a solution for Wang drop me a note Bill@MrExcel.com and we’ll see on the podcast.
By the way next Thursday in the US is Thanksgiving which means that next Friday is the day that everyone goes crazy and goes out early in the morning to do their Christmas Shopping. Well I know you, you don’t want to go to Best Buy in order to get the big 42-inch Plasma screen. You’re really looking for some great Excel books and if you want to tell your folks to go out to Mr.Excel.com there’s a secret coupon code there on the screen which will get you 20% off, any order so tell me indeed Excel Goers Gotten Wealth or maybe to live lessons VBA and we’ll see you if you get underneath the Christmas tree for you.
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by. See you next time for another netcast from Mr. Excel.
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