Requirements: Power-user version 1.6.1201 or higher, with a Premium Entreprise license 

Benefits of configuring Chart Templates

Formatting charts is one of the most problematic tasks in PowerPoint and Excel:

• Because the corporate templates have usually not been properly defined for Excel, each user creates charts that are not compliant with the corporate brand. 
• When the user paste a chart into PowerPoint, they will either end up with a patchwork of multiple inconsistent color sets, or have to spend time reformatting it because the format will be broken when converted to the theme of PowerPoint. 
• Formatting charts is very time-consuming, because of all the steps required to adjust the chart size, area, borders, title, series, legend, axes, gridlines, etc.
• Very often, users will even need to perform these formatting steps many times, because they will update the chart values in Excel and paste again every time in PowerPoint, which means formatting it again every time. This specific issue has been addressed by a dedicated feature for creating robust links between Excel and PowerPoint. 

With the Power-user add-in, users can easily have access to a set of chart templates that are already perfectly compliant, ensuring visual consistency throughout the entire organization while saving users a considerable amount of time. As an admin, you can define as many chart templates as you wish. 

The templates are centrally defined, and made available to all users directly in the "Insert Chart" menu, as you can see below:

How to configuring Chart Templates

Configuring Chart Templates is very easy:

• Launch Excel.
• Go to the "Insert" tab, and insert a new chart based on any data set.
• Format the new chart to make it match your corporate brand and look as nice as possible. A few pieces of advice:
  • Try to anticipate that their might be many series to your chart. We recommend creating the template with a chart thas has a series for each color of the color palette.
  • Make sure the colors are consistent with the corporate Master Templates defined for PowerPoint and Word (see Configuring Master Templates for your organization), so charts look the same in all applications.
  • Think about all the elements of the chart: axis (color, tickmarks, font size...), titles (font, color, size, position...), labels (position, color, font size, background color...), gridlines, legend (position), series (color, border color and weight, markers, spacing...), etc.
  • Make sure there is a visual consistency across all the Chart Templates.
• When a chart is ready, right-click it and hit "Save as Template". 
  • The chart template will be saved as a .crtx file.
  • Instead of the default location (which will save it as template just for yourself as a user), change it to your Desktop or any other location where you can easily find all your templates.

• Repeat the steps above for each Chart Template you need. 
  • We recommend defining at least 1 template for each of the main chart types: column chart, line chart, pie chart and bar chart, but preferrably for more. 
  • You can also define templates for more complex visualizations, such as Combo Charts. For instance, a combo of a Column Chart and a Line Chart can be quite useful. Also, combining a Columns Chart with an invisible Line Chart (which has just visible labels) can allow users to show totals on top of their Columns Chart.
  • You can have a look at this infographics on the most useful chart types to get some inspiration.
• Now you can publish the Chart Templates to make them available to all users (see below).

Publishing the Chart Templates

After configuring your Chart Templates, you can publish them for all users in your organization. To publish a template:

• Add a new folder to your file-sharing solution (e.g. shared drive or network). You can name it as you wish (for instance, "Chart Templates")
• In that folder, place the .crtx files you have created
• Connect to your admin portal, using your organization's credentials
• Go to the "Brand compliance" menu
• Click "New" to add a new Chart Template, or use the pre-defined item
• The pre-defined Chart Template already has the "Local path" field specified with the default location that will be used by Excel on each user's computer to pick the template. But it is still possible that your organization has a different default path for some reason, in that case locate the default path or contact us for help to locate it.
• Enter the direct link to the Chart Template file (see Getting the direct link to a file or folder)
• Save your changes

Before rolling-out a template to all users, we strongly recommend you to assign it only to a "Test" team, assign yourself as a user to that "Test" team and check that it works as expected.