Microsoft Excel Making a Chart with Pictures

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Last updated: Jun 03, 2024 by lmotowski

Table of Contents

Adding Pictures to your Chart

You can make the bars of your chart pictures instead of solid colors if you wish.

  • Select the FORMAT tab from the toolbar:

  • Make sure the data you want to add pictures to is highlighted. You can check that it is in the top left hand corner of Excel. You will know that it is the right series if the bars on the chart have the little selection circles around them. Next click on the Shape Fillmenu. From the Shape Fill menu you can select different colors, textures, gradients and pictures. In this case we will select Picture:

  • From this menu you can either search the internet to find a picture or pick one from your computer. I recommend finding the picture you want to use beforehand and saving it to your computer so you know what you want to use beforehand.

  • Click Browse:

  • Select the image you want and hit Insert:

  • The bars on your graph will now show your picture instead of a solid color:


Modifying the Pictures

  • You can change the images on the graph for instance if I want to show relative numbers of koalas then I an use the Stack option instead of stretch.

  • Double click on the bars of the graph to open up the sidebar:

  • Click the paint bucket to open the fill menu:

  • Select Stack instead of Stretch to show individual pictures instead of one stretched out picture:

  • Here is the chart with stretched koalas:

  • Here is the chart with individual koalas:

  • You can even have each koala image represent a specific number for your data. Say this is a graph of the Koala population over ten years and I want each koala to represent 50 koalas. I can use the Stack and Scale with option to set the specific number:

 

(When doing this if you have large data values I would recommend making each picture represent a large number of data. Having one koala picture for every koala made my computer run very slowly since it had to display 1023 koala images. It can be a lot for the computer to handle.)

  • Here is the chart with each koala picture representing 50 koalas.