How to Change the Color of a Data Series in Excel

Changing the color of a data series in an Excel chart can transform a bland spreadsheet into a clear, persuasive story. It's one of the simplest ways to guide your audience’s attention, highlight key trends, and make your data much easier to understand. This guide will walk you through several easy methods for customizing your chart colors, from applying pre-made themes to precisely coloring individual data points.

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Why Bother Changing Chart Colors?

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Strategic color choices aren't just about making your chart look nice, they are critical for effective data communication. Here are a few reasons why you should take a moment to customize your chart colors:

• To Improve Clarity: Default color palettes can be confusing, especially with multiple data series. Assigning distinct, easy-to-distinguish colors to each series helps your audience instantly grasp what they're looking at.
• To Emphasize Key Data: Do you want to highlight a record-breaking sales month or a problem area? Changing the color of a specific bar, line, or pie slice draws immediate attention to the most important part of your story.
• To Add Context and Meaning: Color can convey meaning universally. For example, using green for positive results (like profit or growth) and red for negative results (like losses or declines) is an intuitive way to provide immediate context without needing extra labels.
• To Maintain Brand Consistency: When creating reports for your company, using official brand colors creates a professional, cohesive look that reinforces brand identity in presentations and internal documents.

Method 1: The Quickest Way Using Chart Styles

If you need to quickly update your chart’s entire color scheme and don't need granular control, Excel's built-in Chart Styles feature is your best friend. This is the fastest way to apply a professionally designed color palette.

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Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Select your chart: First, click anywhere on your chart to select it. You’ll see a border appear around it, and additional contextual tabs ("Chart Design" and "Format") will show up in the ribbon.
2. Open Chart Styles: Look for the paintbrush icon that appears on the right side of the chart. Click it to open the Chart Styles pane.
3. Choose a Color Palette: At the top of the pane, click the "Color" tab. Here, you'll see a gallery of color schemes.
4. Apply the Palette: Simply click on any color scheme to instantly apply it to your chart. Hover over the options to see a live preview before you click.

This method is perfect when you need a good-looking chart in seconds, but its one major limitation is that you're stuck with the pre-defined palettes. For more custom changes, you’ll need one of the following methods.

Method 2: For Full Control Over a Single Data Series

Most of the time, you'll want to change the color of one specific data series — for example, making all the bars representing "2023 Sales" blue. This method gives you complete control over the color of an entire series.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Select the Data Series: Click once on any single element within the data series you want to change. For instance, in a bar chart, click on one of the bars. You will see that all the bars in that specific series are now selected.
2. Open the Formatting Pane: Right-click on the selected series. From the context menu that appears, choose "Format Data Series..." This will open the Format Data Series pane on the right-hand side of your Excel window.
3. Access the Fill & Line Options: In the Format Data Series pane, click on the paint bucket icon labeled "Fill & Line."
4. Change the Fill Color:
5. Change the Border (Optional): Similarly, under the "Border" section, you can change the color and thickness of the outline around your bars, columns, or areas. Select "Solid line" and choose a color.

For line charts, the process is nearly identical, but instead of "Fill," you will change the color under the "Line" section of this same pane. You can also customize the markers on the line under the "Marker" section.

Method 3: To Highlight a Single Data Point

What if you don't want to change an entire series, but just a single bar, pie slice, or data point? This technique is incredibly powerful for drawing attention to a specific piece of data, such as your best-performing month or a single competitor's results.

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Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. First Click - Select the Series: Click once on the series that contains the data point you want to highlight. Just like before, this selects the entire series.
2. Second Click - Select the Single Item: Now, without clicking anywhere else, click again on the specific bar, dot, or pie slice you want to change. You'll notice that now only that individual element has the selection marks around it. This is the crucial step: a slow double-click.
3. Open the Formatting Options: Right-click the selected data point and choose "Format Data Point..." from the menu.
4. Choose Your Color: The process is now the same as changing a whole series. Use the "Fill & Line" tab in the "Format Data Point" pane to select a new fill and/or border color.

This technique is a game-changer. For example, in a bar chart showing website traffic sources, you could make the "Organic Search" bar a bright, contrasting color to show it’s the most significant driver of traffic.

Method 4: Applying Different Colors to Every Point

Sometimes, particularly with bar or column charts representing distinct categories, you may want every bar to have a different color. Excel has a quick setting for this that saves you from coloring each one manually.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Select the Data Series: Click once on any bar in the series to select them all.
2. Open the Format Data Series Pane: Right-click and choose "Format Data Series..."
3. Vary the Colors: In the "Fill & Line" section of the pane, go to the "Fill" options. Check the box that says "Vary colors by point."

Instantly, Excel will apply a different color from the active color theme to each data point in your series. This feature is enabled by default for pie charts and doughnut charts but is very useful for bar and column charts where each category is unique.

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Advanced Tip: Matching Your Company's Brand Colors

For professional reports, using exact brand colors is a must. You can easily do this in Excel using Hex or RGB color codes.

1. Follow the steps in Method 2 or 3 to get to the color selection palette.
2. At the bottom of the palette, click "More Colors..."
3. In the dialog box that appears, click the "Custom" tab.
4. Here, you can enter the precise color values. Either input the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) numbers or enter the Hex code (e.g., #1DA1F2 for Twitter's blue).
5. Click "OK," and your chart will now use that exact color. Excel will also save it in the "Recent Colors" section for quick access later.

Final Thoughts

Mastering something as seemingly simple as changing chart colors in Excel gives you a powerful tool for better storytelling with data. Whether you're making a quick change with chart styles or methodically highlighting a key metric, strategic color use brings life to your reports and makes your insights impossible to ignore.

While customizing charts in Excel is an invaluable skill, the process can become repetitive, especially when you're managing reports that pull data from various sources like Google Analytics, your CRM, or advertising platforms. At Graphed, we built our tool to eliminate this friction. Instead of manually exporting data and formatting charts, you can simply use natural language to ask for exactly what you need - like, "Create a pie chart showing my top traffic sources from Google Analytics this month." Graphed instantly builds a live, interactive dashboard, letting you focus on the insights from your data, not the busywork of creating it.