How to Use a Saved Chart Template in Excel

You’ve been there before. It’s the first week of the month, and you need to prepare the same sales performance report you create every month. You spend the first thirty minutes in Excel not on analysis, but on tediously re-applying your company’s brand colors, adjusting font sizes, removing gridlines, and tweaking the axis labels on your charts. Creating consistent, professional-looking charts is a necessary but often repetitive chore. This article will show you how to save and reuse custom chart formats in Excel, cutting down on setup time and ensuring all your reports look consistent and polished.

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Why Bother with Excel Chart Templates?

Creating a chart template might sound like an extra step now, but it’s a classic case of spending five minutes today to save hours down the road. The benefits go far beyond just saving a little time.

Save bucketloads of time.

The most obvious benefit is speed. Instead of manually formatting every single chart from scratch, you can apply your custom style with just two or three clicks. When you’re creating weekly or monthly reports, this time saved adds up significantly, freeing you up to focus on analyzing the data rather than decorating it.

Maintain brand consistency.

If you're creating reports for presentations, clients, or internal stakeholders, visual consistency is professional. Chart templates ensure that every chart you create uses the same color palette, fonts, and layout. No more guessing the exact hex code of your company’s brand blue or trying to remember which font you used last time. Your reports will always look like they belong together.

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Simplify collaboration and onboarding.

When everyone on your team uses the same chart templates, it standardizes your reporting. New team members can start producing correctly formatted charts from day one without needing a detailed style guide. You can share your template file, and suddenly everyone is on the same page, producing work that is instantly recognizable and uniform.

How to Create and Save an Excel Chart Template

Ready to build your first template? The process is simple. You just need to create and format one chart perfectly, then save that formatting for future use.

Step 1: Create and Style Your Master Chart

First, build the chart that will serve as the foundation of your template. Let’s imagine we’re creating a simple column chart template for monthly sales reporting.

• Select Your Data: Highlight a sample dataset, just like you normally would.
• Insert a Chart: Go to the Insert tab, find the Charts group, and choose the chart type you want (e.g., Clustered Column).
• Format Everything: This is the most important step. Customize every element of the chart that you want to save. Think about:

Design this chart to be your ideal, go-to visual. Once you're happy with its appearance, you're ready to save it.

Step 2: Save the Chart as a Template

With your perfectly styled chart selected, the next step takes just a couple of clicks:

1. Right-click anywhere on the chart area (the background of the chart).
2. From the context menu, select Save as Template...

A "Save Chart Template" dialog box will pop up. Excel automatically points you to the correct default folder where it stores chart templates.

Give your template a clear, descriptive name - for example, "Monthly Sales Column" or "Branded Line Chart." Finally, click Save. Your chart formatting is now saved as a special file with a .crtx extension.

How to Apply Your Saved Chart Template

Now that you’ve done the setup work, a consistent, professionally formatted chart is always just seconds away. There are two slightly different ways to do this, depending on whether you’re creating a new chart or restyling an existing one.

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Applying a Template to New Data

This is the most common use case. You have a fresh set of data and want to visualize it using your custom style.

1. Select your new data range.
2. Go to the Insert tab and find the Charts group.
3. Click on Recommended Charts.
4. In the "Insert Chart" window that appears, click the All Charts tab at the top.
5. In the navigation pane on the left, click on the Templates folder. You should see your saved template appearing as a thumbnail.
6. Click on your template and hit OK.

Voila! Excel instantly creates a new chart with your data, already formatted with the exact colors, fonts, and layout you designed, saving you all the manual adjustment.

Applying a Template to an Existing Chart

Let's say you've already created a quick chart, but now you want to apply your professional brand style to it.

1. Select the existing chart you want to reformat.
2. Go to the Chart Design tab on the Ribbon (this tab appears when a chart is selected).
3. Click on Change Chart Type.
4. The "Change Chart Type" window will open. Just like before, click on the Templates folder on the left.
5. Select your saved chart template and click OK.

Your existing chart will immediately update to match the formatting from your template, without you having to touch a single color or font setting.

Advanced Tips for Managing Your Templates

Once you get the hang of templates, a few extra tips can make them even more powerful, especially if you work in a team environment.

Set a Custom Chart as Your Default

Do you use one particular style for 80% of your work? You can set it as your default chart. To do this, apply the template to an existing chart using the "Change Chart Type" > "Templates" method described above. Then, with the Templates folder still selected, right-click on your preferred template and select Set as Default Chart. Now, whenever you select data and press a shortcut like ALT + F1 (on Windows) or Fn + Option + F1 (on Mac) to create a chart, Excel will automatically use your custom template.

Sharing Templates with Your Team

To share your creations, you simply need to find the .crtx file on your computer and send it to your colleagues. They can then place it in their own Excel Chart Templates folder.

Here’s where to find the folder:

• Windows: C:\Users\[YourUsername]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Charts
• Mac: /Users/[YourUsername]/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Chart Templates/

Note: The 'AppData' (on Windows) and 'Library' (on Mac) folders may be hidden by default. You may need to enable "Show hidden files" in your system settings to navigate to them.

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What Gets Saved in a Template (and What Doesn't)?

It’s helpful to know the boundaries of what a template does. A template saves everything related to formatting and style: colors, fonts, axis scales, gridlines, legends, titles, and layout. It does not save the underlying data, specific axis titles (like "January Sales"), or annotations you’ve manually added to a data point. This is by design, as it allows the template to be a flexible styling layer that you can apply to any dataset.

Final Thoughts

Excel chart templates are a straightforward yet powerful feature for anyone who regularly creates reports. By saving your preferred visual style, you eliminate repetitive administrative work, enforce high standards of visual consistency, and ultimately save valuable time that you can reinvest into a deeper analysis of your data.

Saving chart formatting is a fantastic productivity hack for reports you build in spreadsheets. But often, the biggest drain on time isn’t the styling - it’s the hours spent manually downloading data from a dozen different marketing and sales platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce just to get it into Excel in the first place. That’s why we built Graphed to take things a step further. We automate the entire process by connecting directly to all your data sources, allowing you to instantly build real-time, self-updating dashboards by simply describing what you want in plain English. No more downloading CSVs or building the same report over and over.