In this guide, I'll walk you through the different ways to format your chart, with Excel's main chart-formatting actions written in bold so you can find them more easily.

How to Format a Color Chart in Excel. Microsoft Excel gives you a boatload of options for changing the format of color charts. You can change the layout of a chart, then customize that layout to ...

How to Format the Layout in a Pie Chart. Microsoft Excel's chart feature makes it pretty simple to "get your piece of the pie" into a spreadsheet, but once you've added that visual, it may seem ...

The interface is simpler in Excel 2013, with only the Design and Format tabs to choose from. In addition, a set of icons appears outside the top right edge of a chart when it is selected.

When you select a range, Excel 2013 pops up a "Quick Analysis" box. Click on it, and you're given a selection of recommended formatting, chart, calculation, and pivot table options.

Software engineer Chandoo shares some Excel conditional formatting tricks that make for good-looking and useful spreadsheets, like a Gantt chart.

Learn 10 cool techniques that will make your Excel charts way sexier.