It’s time to ditch the legend.

You know – the legend, the key, the thing near-ish the graph that tells the reader what each piece of your graph means.

We don’t need it.

Legends are actually hard for many people to work with because they put a burden on the reader to seek and match up each line with its legend entry.

It’s better if we just label the lines directly.

Here’s how to directly label in Excel.

First, (and this is the super fun part) click on the existing legend and delete it. Just hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Smile. It feels good.

The idea is to put the labels on the right end of each line.

We’ll need to create room there, so click inside the middle of the graph, in the empty area (called the Plot Area) so it’s activated. You’ll see circle handles at the corners and along the sides. Drag the right side handle to the left, toward the inside of the graph, to make room.

Now we have a space to add the labels. There are two ways to do this.

Way #1: Excel Labels

Click on one line and you’ll see how every data point shows up. If we add a label to every data point, our readers are going to mount a recall election. So carefully click again on just the last point on the right.

Now right-click on that last point and select Add Data Label.

THIS IS WHEN YOU BE CAREFUL. If it says “Labels” as in plural, Excel if going to add a label to every point on your line. You must not have selected the last point carefully enough. Try again and make sure it says “Label” singular.

If it pops in your value instead of the name of your series, right-click on the point again (not the label) and select Format Data Label (WATCH FOR THE PLURAL/SINGULAR BUSINESS HERE). In the dialogue box that opens, check Series and uncheck Value. Boom.

You could also kick this up a notch and change the label font color to match your line color. Bonus points. You know where your font color button is – the Home tab.

If you hate how the gridline is running through your label, use the Fill button and fill it with white (Fill is right next to the font color button in Home).

Sometimes your labels are loooooong and the break onto two lines and center themselves. Ew. You can fix that in the Format Data Label menu. Go to the third icon, look in Alignment and UNcheck Wrap text in shape.

Sweet! You directly labeled your chart.

Way #2: Textboxes

If all of that sounds like way too much right-clicking and left-clicking for you, just insert a text box at the end of the line and type the label name.

You know how to insert a text box, right? Of course you do! You just probably never did so inside Excel. But it works!

Insert>Textbox then draw the textbox in the graph and type away.

Did you forget the name of your line? Hover on it and Excel will tell you.

The nice thing about the textboxes is that you can change the label to say whatever you want.

The downside of textboxes is that they aren’t tied to the spreadsheet, so if your dataset changes, you’ll have to edit your labels. If your lines move, you’ll have to manually move your labels.

Each method of directly labeling has definite pros and cons so it’s good to know how to do both.

Whichever way you pick, your audience is going to be grateful that you’ve saved them from the mental gymnastics of a typical legend.

This is so important to the readability of our charts that I’ve made this a formal guideline in the Data Visualization Checklist. Upload your graph and see how you fare.