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.
