Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office 2003 in 24 Hours

By Greg Perry

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You!
  • Introduction
  • Who Should Read This Book?
  • What This Book Does for You
  • Can This Book Really Teach Office 2003 in 24 Hours?
  • Conventions Used in This Book
  • Part I. Working with Office 2003
  • Hour 1. Getting Acquainted with Office 2003
  • Part II. Processing with Word 2003
  • Hour 2. Welcome to Word 2003
  • Hour 3. Formatting with Word 2003
  • Hour 4. Managing Documents and Customizing Word 2003
  • Hour 5. Advanced Word 2003
  • Part III. Computing with Excel 2003
  • Hour 6. Understanding Excel 2003 Workbooks
  • Hour 7. Restructuring and Editing Excel 2003 Worksheets
  • Hour 8. Using Excel 2003
  • Hour 9. Formatting Worksheets to Look Great
  • Hour 10. Charting with Excel 2003
    • Creating Custom Graphs
    • A Quick Chart
    • Making Your Chart Fancy
    • Summary
    • Q&A
  • Part IV. Presenting with Flair
  • Hour 11. PowerPoint 2003 Presentations
  • Hour 12. Editing and Arranging Your Presentations
  • Hour 13. PowerPoint 2003 Advanced Features
  • Hour 14. Animating Your Presentations
  • Part V. Organizing with Outlook 2003
  • Hour 15. Communicating with Outlook 2003
  • Hour 16. Planning and Scheduling with Outlook 2003
  • Part VI. Tracking with Access 2003
  • Hour 17. Access 2003 Basics
  • Hour 18. Entering and Displaying Access 2003 Data
  • Hour 19. Retrieving Your Data
  • Hour 20. Reporting with Access 2003
  • Part VII. Combining Office 2003 and the Internet
  • Hour 21. Office 2003 and the Internet
  • Hour 22. Creating Web Content with Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint
  • Part VIII. Publishing Eye-Catching Documents
  • Hour 23. Publishing with Flair Using Publisher 2003
  • Hour 24. Adding Art to Your Publications
  • Part IX. Appendixes
  • Appendix B. Business Contact Manager and Office Extras
  • Part X. Bonus Hours
  • Hour 25. Using FrontPage 2003 for Web Page Design and Creation
  • Hour 26. Managing Your Web with FrontPage

Making Your Chart Fancy

In spite of the huge assortment of charts, you don't have to limit yourself to the chart types that Excel provides. You can customize virtually any part of the chart, including adding a background image.

Consider the rather simple-looking chart in Figure 10.7. When the user created this chart, she added a chart title and titles for the x- and y-axis descriptions as well. Nevertheless, the chart is lacking in style. It has no personality. It might be fully functional, but if the suser wants to use it for a presentation, she might want to pretty it up somewhat.

Figure 10.7 Your chart can contain chart titles that you specify.

To Do: Add a Background Picture to Your Chart

To add a background picture, you only need to follow these simple steps:

1. Click the chart to display the chart's resizing handles. Increase the size of the chart area by dragging the resizing handles outward.
2. Click the plot area to display its resizing handles and return the plot area to its original size. Move any titles and legend labels back to their places around the graph. You have now added some whitespace inside the graph's area where you can place a picture.
3. Click the Formatting toolbar's (not the Chart toolbar's) Fill Color down arrow to open the Fill Color palette. Make sure that you have the chart area selected and not a label or a title.
4. You could simply select a color and that color would fill the area around your graph. If you'd rather not use a simple color, you can fill your chart's background with a picture by clicking the Fill Color palette's Fill Effects to open the dialog box shown in Figure 10.8. Using the Fill Effects dialog box, you can select many different interesting fills for your chart, such as the Variants area, which gradually changes one color to another.
   

   Figure 10.8 You can create a customized chart using the Fill Effects dialog box.

5. Click the Fill Effects dialog box's Picture tab.
6. Click the Select Picture button and locate a picture on your disk to use as the background of your chart. Depending on how the picture mingles with your legend and graph titles, you might need to reformat the color and font size of those so they appear on top of the picture. Figure 10.9 shows the dramatic difference that a background picture can make as opposed to a chart by itself.
   

   Figure 10.9 A background picture makes a dramatic difference in your chart's presentation.

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