Dynamic Chart Title

This tutorial shows you how to create a dynamic chart title that will document begin and end dates for an XY Trend Chart with a simple Excel Concatenation Formula. It is based on example found in Trend_Control_Chrt_Basics.XLS.

1. Adding Title To Chart

We will look at several ways to add chart titles. Here's our trend chart without a title.

There are several ways to add titles to Excel charts using either the Excel Chart Wizard or dynamic formulas. Let's look at the chart wizard first, then we will look at the alternatives.

Using the Chart Options, we enter our title:

and get the following result.

Excel has sized and placed the Title. Notice that the chart area is actually smaller, the title has taken up a more space than necessary. What happens when the time period changes, if we add another weeks worth of data? We will need to manually edit the title.

2. Dynamic Chart Title

We can make the chart title dynamic by referencing it to a cell that updates the title by formula. This takes 6 simple steps:

1. Select Cell to Add a title formula, Cell L40 in the example.
2. Enter formula:         = "Fluoride Test Results " & Text(Min(Data!A:A),"m/d/yy") & " to " & Text(Max(Data!A:A),"m/d/yy")
3. Select chart and select title
4. Enter = in Formula Bar
5. Point cursor to cell with title
6. Press Enter

The title is now linked to the contents in cell L40. Any changes in cell L40 will automatically show up in the chart title.