Chart Styles in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Long time PowerPoint users will remember the difficulties of charting. It was so painful, time-consuming, and repetitive a task changing the fills of all the series one after the other. Moreover, if your presentation had more than one chart slide, then you also had to ensure that all charts looked the same.

PowerPoint 2007 made things simple and PowerPoint 2010 for Windows takes it further by making this sort of repetitive formatting easy and consistent with the Chart Styles option. These are predefined styles that contain combinations of formatting elements such as fills, outlines, and effects. PowerPoint provides various styles to choose from, and all these styles are based on Office Themes.

To apply a chart style, you first need to have a chart in your presentation. Learn how to insert a chart in PowerPoint 2010, and then follow these steps to apply a chart style in PowerPoint 2010:

1. Select the chart on your slide. Doing so shows the context-sensitive Chart Tools tabs in the Ribbon area, as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Chart Tools in PowerPoint
2. Within the Chart Tools Design tab of the Ribbon, you'll find the Chart Styles group that you can see in Figure 2. Click the downward pointing arrow found towards the bottom right side of the Chart Styles gallery (highlighted in red).
3. 
   Figure 2: Chart Styles in PowerPoint
3. Doing so opens the dropdown Chart Styles gallery, as shown in Figure 3.
4. 
   Figure 3: Chart Styles gallery in PowerPoint
4. To apply any style, click on the actual preview thumbnail of the style you want. Figure 4 shows a Chart Style applied to a selected chart.
5. 
   Figure 4: Chart Style applied in PowerPoint
5. Save your presentation.