Formatting of colors and themes in excel charts

Hi

In my job I have to make lots of charts using excel, usually bar charts. What I’ve noticed is that sometimes if I copy and paste a chart and then change the data, the colours will remain the same, and other times it will change. Can anybody explain this? It would save me a lot of time if I could me if I could fix it to retain the colors every time.

Special paste, keep format doesn’t work, and setting the workbook themes doesn’t help because I need to make charts with different themes in the same workbook.

So can anybody help me with one of the following:

1)Making pasted charts retain their colors when changing the underlying data
2)Perhaps making themes operate on a single page
3)Making personalized themes available to apply to a single chart. Why wouldn’t this option be available readily?

Thanks in advance for any and all help advice given.

Guess nobody has an idea, huh?

Hi,

If you change the underlying data on a chart that you have manually formatted through the format data series menu, the colors will return to default.
However, if you change the chart colors through Design > Change Colors, the formatting should stay the same, when you copy the chart and then change the data. Unfortunately, this way you don't have that much control over the formatting. Still, you can edit these predefined color sets in Page Layout > Colors > Themes.

Hope this helps!