Excel Chart Titles

Excel Chart titles are often a wasted opportunity to connect with your audience and drive home your message. So, let’s look at some ideas for how we can leverage the chart title to help you and your audience get the most from the chart.

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Ideas for Excel Chart Titles

Keep in mind that you’re not limited to the default bold chart title. Consider splitting it into a title and subtitle. The title is short and snappy and introduces the chart, whereas the subtitle can be a little longer and expand the story or findings in the data. Or maybe you only need a longer subtitle.

Here are some ideas you can use for chart titles and subtitles:

• Tell a (short) story or narrative around the data.
• Define the key message you’re wanting to convey to your audience. Tell the story in words that your chart tells visually, thus reinforcing the message.
• Call out subtle trends or patterns instead of adding a trendline, especially if the chart is already busy. In the chart below it’s easy to see that the winter losses are increasing, but the decreasing summer losses is subtle. I’ve used the subtitle to make it clear and draw the reader’s attention to those points. I’ve also used colour to create relationships between the columns the subtitle is calling out.

• Often a colour coded subtitle can replace the need for a legend at all:


Tip: When removing the legend and relying on the title or subtitle colour coding keep in mind those with colour blindness and be sure to use colours that are easily distinguished. Making the coloured font bold will also help differentiate them from the rest of the text.

• Add context or detail not present in the chart, like the one below that states the percentage change in beekeepers since their peak:

Data source used in Bee charts: https://beeinformed.org

How to Add a Subtitle to Excel Charts

We can use a Text Box to add a subtitle field to a chart. First select the chart > Insert tab > Shapes > Text Box:

Draw the text box onto the chart below the Title. Tip: Type in your subtitle while the text box is active otherwise the text box will disappear if you click off the chart before entering any text.

Note: Selecting the chart before inserting the text box will automatically group the chart and text box together, which means if you move the chart the text box will come too.

Writing Good Excel Chart Titles

Just because something is clear to you doesn’t mean it will be clear to your audience. Consider using a tool like readable.io to test your titles and subtitles. It uses readability algorithms to identify what level of education someone will need to read a piece of text easily. It’ll help you refine and simplify your message so that it’s easier to read and understand.

More Chart Design Tips

Of course, there are lots of elements that go into good chart design. Here are some related tutorials:

Plus, one of my favourite chart and design blogs is Ann K. Emery. Ann has loads of great ideas and examples including posts on PowerPoint presentations.

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