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Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast. Episode # 1810
Monochrome Chart in Excel Pattern Fills
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Still in Fort Myers and a question came up.
They said. Hey, look we create charts, but we don't print them in black and white.
We're sending a bunch of copies out and
now we're just putting a monochrome. How can we make them do Pattern Fills?
Well, ok so you know the first click selects all of the wedges.
Second click selects one wedge.
But then back here on the Format tab under Shape Fill. There's nothing there for Pattern Fills
There's the Texture Fills.
But that's really not going to help if we're printing in black and white so we want to
press Ctrl + 1 to get into the Format Data Point.
Here under Fill there is a Pattern Fill option.
Choose a foreground color of black, background color white and then one of these
Fills and then while this is open, you can reach back here on the chart.
Click on the next one Fill Pattern Fill
Choose some contrasting
Pattern Fill Pattern Fill
as you can imagine this is going to be a tedious process and boy would it be nice if
Microsoft had
an option just to
you know, create a Pattern Fill type, it sure,  that one's actually too close,
so let's switch to that one or maybe that one.
I know you can play with it. Try and figure out things that are different.
Alright, so the Pattern Fills. By the way the Pattern Fills were not there in excel 2007.
I'm making the legend a little bit larger here,
in hopes that it'll make the squares larger, but of course it does not.
So here's my tip. If you have to create a bunch of these. Let's
just create a temporary chart with more points than you're ever going to need.
Use the method that I just described
to add different types of patterns to each one.
Select that chart and then under
Chart tools
Design
Save As Template
and we'll call it monochrome.
pie like that, and then the next time that you have a chart.
So you have some data like this and you want to create a chart from that data. Rather than using the pie chart,
here on the Insert tab will go to the Dialog launcher.
Go to Templates. You have to hover to find monochrome pie.
Look at monochrome pie.
Click OK and it will remember all of those
settings that we had used in the original chart, provided you have less than 10.
If you someday come in and you have more items
and create the chart
from that, then the eleventh item is going to be in color and you're going to have to fix that
unfortunately. So right there that 11 item.
So make sure when you do the first one and save it as a template you just use an insane number of
categories more than you would ever possibly need to use.
Well, hey i want to thank you for stopping by.
Will see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
