How to Label Data Points in Google Sheets

A chart without labels can feel like a map without city names - you can see the general shape of things, but you’re missing the specific, vital information. Adding data labels to your Google Sheets charts is the single best way to make them instantly easier to understand. This guide will walk you through exactly how to add, customize, and even strategically place data labels to make your charts clear, professional, and insightful.

Why Add Data Labels in the First Place?

Data labels serve a simple but powerful purpose: they display the exact value of a data point directly on the chart. This immediate context saves your audience from having to guess values based on gridlines or hover over each point individually. It’s all about making your data as easy to read as possible.

Consider an average bar chart showing monthly sales. Without labels, you can see that July was a better month than June. With labels, you know that July brought in $12,500 compared to June’s $9,800. That specific detail makes the information more concrete and actionable.

Adding labels helps to:

• Highlight key values: Immediately draw attention to peaks, troughs, or specific milestones.
• Improve readability: Eliminate the need for your audience to trace lines back to an axis.
• Add precision: Show the exact numbers behind a trend, turning estimations into facts.

The Quickest Way: Adding Basic Data Labels

For most charts, Google Sheets makes it incredibly easy to turn on standard data labels. This will display the numerical value for each point in your data series. Let's walk through it with a simple sales dataset.

Imagine you have this data:

Here’s how to create a chart and add labels:

1. Select your data: Highlight all the cells, including the headers (e.g., A1 through B5).
2. Insert a chart: Go to the menu and click Insert > Chart. Google Sheets will automatically suggest a chart type, usually a line or column chart.
3. Open the Chart editor: Your chart will appear along with the Chart editor pane on the right side of your screen. If you closed it, just double-click anywhere on your chart to reopen it.
4. Find the Data Labels option: In the Chart editor, click on the Customize tab, then click on the Series section to expand it.
5. Check the box: Scroll down a bit and you'll see a checkbox labeled "Data labels." Click it. Poof! The values from your 'Sales' column will now appear directly on your chart's bars or points.

Just like that, you’ve made your chart significantly more informative. From here, you can customize the position, font, and color of the labels to make them fit your chart’s style perfectly.

Customizing Your Data Labels for Readability and Style

Once you've added your labels, you have several options to fine-tune their appearance in that same Customize > Series menu. Getting these settings right can turn a cluttered chart into a clean, professional visualization.

Positioning Your Labels

The "Position" dropdown lets you control where the labels appear relative to their data points. The options are different depending on your chart type.

• For column or bar charts: You typically have choices like Auto, Center, Inside end, or Outside end. "Outside end" is usually the cleanest choice, placing the label just above the bar.
• For line charts: Common options are Auto, Above, Below, Left, or Right of the data point. "Above" often works best to avoid overlapping with the line itself.
• For pie charts: You get more specific options, which we'll cover in its own section below.

Experiment with the position to see what makes your specific chart easiest to read without labels overlapping each other.

Styling Text and Numbers

Beyond position, you can also control the look of the labels themselves:

• Label font, font size, and format: Change the font to match your presentation, make the text a bit smaller to reduce clutter, or make it bold to stand out.
• Label text color: Make sure your label color has enough contrast against the background and the chart colors. If you have dark blue bars, a white or light gray label might be much more readable than the default black.
• Number format: This is an incredibly useful feature. If your source data is just a number like 12500, but you want it to appear on your chart as $12,500.00 or '12.5K', you can set that here without changing your original spreadsheet data.

Labeling Only Specific Data Points

Sometimes, labeling every single point adds more noise than clarity, especially on a line chart with many data points. A more effective strategy is to label only the most important ones — like the peak performance, the lowest point, or a specific launch date.

You can’t do this with a single checkbox in Google Sheets, but it's easily achieved by adding a new data series just for your labels. It sounds complex, but it’s a simple formula-based trick.

Let's say we want to highlight only the sales month that broke $12,000 from this dataset:

Here’s the step-by-step method:

1. Create a new helper column: Next to your 'Sales' column (let's say it's column B), create a new column called "Highlight Label" (in column C).
2. Use an IF formula: In the first cell of your new column (C2), enter a formula that checks if the value in B2 meets your condition. For our example, we want to label anything over $12,000. The formula would be:
3. Understand the formula: This formula tells Google Sheets: "If the value in cell B2 is greater than 12,000, show the value from B2 here. Otherwise, show nothing." The NA() is crucial — it creates an #N/A error that Google Sheets knows not to plot on a chart.
4. Add the series to your chart: Double-click your chart to open the editor. Under the Setup tab, click on "Add series" and select your new "Highlight Label" column (column C).
5. Turn on labels for the new series only: Go to the Customize tab > Series. Select your "Highlight Label" series from the dropdown. Check the "Data labels" box for it. Make sure data labels are turned off for your original 'Sales' series.

Now, your chart will display a clean line or set of bars with labels appearing only on the data points that exceeded $12,000. You can get creative with IF formulas to label the max value (=IF(B2=MAX($B$2:$B$7), B2, NA())), minimum value, or any other data point that tells an important part of your story.

How to Best Label Pie and Donut Charts

Pie charts have their own special set of labeling options because you're labeling slices instead of points. When you have a pie chart selected, go to the Customize tab and click on Pie chart.

Here you'll find the "Slice label" dropdown menu with powerful choices:

• None: No labels at all.
• Label: Shows the category name (e.g., "Marketing," "Sales," "Operations").
• Value: Shows the raw number.
• Percentage: Shows the slice's value as a percentage of the total. This is often the most useful option for pie charts.
• Label and Value: Displays both the category name and its value.
• Label and Percentage: Displays both the category and its percentage.

You can also adjust the font size and color here. For pie charts, it's best to stick to just a few slices (five or fewer is a good rule of thumb). Any more than that, and even the best labels can't save it from becoming cluttered and difficult to interpret. For datasets with many categories, a bar chart is almost always a better choice.

Final Thoughts

Adding data labels to your Google Sheets graphs is a fundamental step that elevates your data from a table of numbers to a clear, compelling story. Whether you're applying basic labels to all your data points, strategically highlighting key metrics, or formatting pie chart percentages, this small effort delivers huge returns in clarity and comprehension.

While mastering these settings in Google Sheets is a great skill, the process can become repetitive, especially when dealing with data from multiple sources. We built Graphed to cut out these manual steps entirely. Instead of clicking through menus and adding helper columns, you can simply connect your data sources and describe what you need, like "show me weekly revenue from Shopify as a line chart with labels on the highest and lowest points," and Graphed creates the live dashboard in seconds. It allows my team to get straight to actionable insights, saving us time that we can now spend on strategy instead of report-building.