Hi Everyone,
Here’s some Xcelsius 101 on changing the look of a chart so that things don’t look so plain. Great for people who just need a reference 🙂 I’ve written some step by step instructions on changing a chart from it’s default look to something more attractive.
1. Add your chart and bind the necessary data
2. Add an underlying background to give the the chart some more depth.
3. Now for the first part of changing the look we will need to go into the chart properties, to do this you can either double click/right click on the chart object on the canvas or the object properties window.
4. Click on the Appearance icon and we will make changes to the Layout tab first. By default the chart has Show Chart Background checked. First change the Margin to 1 and then uncheck the Show Chart Background checkbox to remove the background.
5. Go to the Series tab; change the “Fill” color of the bar, change the marker width and then make the bars a little bit more transparent. To change the fill color of the bar, click on the square colored box circled at the top and change it to your desired color. To change the width of each bar, click on the “marker size” area and change it to 35. Finally to make the bars a little more transparent, go to the bottom and change the transparency value.
6. We will make modifications to the Axes tab by making color changes to the horizontal and vertical axis. To do this, click on color boxes highlighted in red and choose dark blue. Also uncheck the “Show Minor Gridlines” on the bottom so that we remove all the horizontal lines in between each of the major gridlines.
7. There are also the Text and Color tabs, where you can make changes to all the different text areas of the chart and control each color area of the chart. I bolded and changed the Chart Title to font size 14, the axis labels font size 12.
As you can see, with a little bit of change to the appearance of the chart, we are able to add that extra wow factor.
