Adding, editing, and removing legends

Although most charts should contain legends to help explain what chart elements refer to, you need to know how to remove a legend, how to add a legend on those charts that don't have them, and edit or reposition legends within a chart as well. Pretty easy stuff here and you can achieve these objectives a couple of different ways. In this chart, there is a legend on the right-hand side and that's just fine. That's the default location. I think that's where we are used to seeing a legend. However, if we select this chart and go to the Layout tab, we can choose the option Legend, and instead of showing it on the right, show it on top. Sometimes that looks better. Personal choice of course. On the left, and without going through every single one of these, you get the idea.

You might notice the last two here. Overlay Legend at Right, certainly not a good choice here. Overlay on the Left. Maybe more so. No matter where the legend does end up, you can click and drag it. We could have done that from the beginning before even going into the menu, but you can click and drag this. Usually just click on it, drag a border, put it wherever you want. And if you want to leave it there, that's fine. A good follow-up on this would be to give it a background color, zip out to the to the Format tab perhaps, choose one of these options, pop a color on it. There we go. And if you have to see those ahead of time, you can certainly do this. [00:01:134.15] Drag it around and explore what those might look like. So, easy to handle.

If the legend is larger, if it encompasses more entries than this one, sometimes what you will want to do to possibly is resize this. If we had four entries there it might do this or stack them up two by two and so on. So you can resize the legend as well. And you can certainly get rid of a legend just by clicking on it and pressing Delete. Again, most of the time you probably do want a legend, but there are certain pie charts when you might have applied data labels, even bar charts or the label that contains all of the information that the legend might. So it's easily added. And if we simply want to add legend right after we create a chart, it's not a bad idea to go to the Design tab and choose one of the Chart Layout options that has legends in it, and at the same time pick up on the titles as well.

Many of these have legends on the right-hand side. After you get used to this particular feature you will recognize some of that have the legend on the bottom too, for example this one. So you see different options there, different ways to control the placement of a legend on a chart.