How to Create Area Charts in Excel

Select the data in the sheet that you want to create area chart. We have following sample data of top countries with area in Square Kms.

5 Steps to draw an area chart

Follow these steps to access and draw an area chart in MS Excel. We will use the 3-D area chart option.

Step 1:

Select the data in the sheet that you want to create an area chart. We have the following sample data of top countries with area in Square Kms.

Excel-area-sample

Step 2:

Go to Insert tab in the ribbon/menu and click on the “Recommended Charts

Excel-area-Insert

Step 3:

In the “Change Chart Type” dialog, click on “All Charts” and then click on “Area” as shown below:

Excel-area-all-charts

Step 4:

Find the “3-D Area” towards the right and press OK

Excel-area-chart-3D

Result:

We have created the following area chart for the demo:

Excel-area-chart-result

Show/Hide Data labels in the chart

To show/hide data labels in the chart, follow this:

Step 1:

Select the created chart and click on the + sign (icon):

Excel-area-plus-icon

 

Step 2:

Under the “CHART ELEMENTS”, click on the “Data Labels” checkbox.

It will display the figures in the chart as labels (see below):

area-chart-date-labels

We also resized the chart to avoid cluttering the figures.

Show/Hide data table

Similarly, you may click on the data table check box to display the data below the chart.

area-chart-date-tables

Change the style of the Area chart

If you want to change the style of the area chart and use one of the other available styles then click on the “Chart Styles” icon after selecting created area chart.

area-chart-style

You can see the list of available styles. Just hover the mouse over any style and you can see how it looks.

Click the style that you like and click again outside of the style box.

We choose dark style-8 and see the result:

area-chart-style-dark

Change color scheme of the chart

Adjacent to style is the “COLOR” option. There you can choose a different color scheme.

Again, hover the mouse over any color scheme and you will its impact on the chart – real-time.

Click on the one you like.

area-chart-Color

Note: You may also notice the options are available on the top menu bar as well.

Removing specific data from the graph

If you want to keep data on an Excel sheet but remove certain entries from displaying in the chart then you may filter that by following this.

Step 1:

Click on the “Filter” icon after selecting the created chart.

Step 2:

Unselect the “CATEGORIES” in the checkboxes that you do not want to display and click “Apply”. We unselected three countries and the result:

area-chart-Category