How to Use PowerPoint Chart Templates to Speed Up Formatting Your Data

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PowerPoint’s Format Painter can save you endless hours with shapes and text boxes, but it doesn’t work on charts. There is, however, a method to save and paste design formatting from one chart to another. So, let’s dive into the mysterious world of Chart Templates and .crtx files.

We’ll start with data sets for the highest paid athletes in 2018 and 2017 and a default chart style (click the images below for a closer look).

Now let’s customize the design on the 2018 chart including changes to the chart type (from columns to bars), colors, fonts, tick marks, grid lines, even custom numbering format for the axis and physical placement of the chart title.

Once we’re happy with all of our manual formatting and design edits, we’ll select the chart and right-click which gives us an option to “Save as Template” which we’ll do and name AthletesHighestPaid_Bar.crtx. Note that as tempted as you might be to save this .crtx somewhere more convenient, you must save it in this default folder in order for this all to work.

To apply this saved style to the 2017 chart, all you need to do is select the target chart, select from the Chart Design tab, Change Chart Type: Templates: Athletes_BarChart.crtx. And voila!

If you have a deck with dozens of similar charts, you can easily see the time savings Chart Templates can provide.

Differences on the PC

In this example, I used a Mac, but functionality on the PC is essentially the same except that the Change Chart Type dialog includes thumbnail images of your saved templates. But be forewarned: These thumbnails are not the most detailed or accurate, as you can see below, so be detailed when naming them.

Accessing Your .crtx Files

If you want to access the .crtx files directly and provide them to a client, for example, you can select “Manage Templates” from the bottom of the Change Chart Type pull down to be taken directly to the folder locations.

And here are the direct paths:

  • Mac: User: Library: Group Containers: UBF8T346G9.Office: User Content: Chart Templates…
  • PC: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Charts

Tips & Cautions

While PowerPoint saves all previous Chart Templates, I usually create new ones on an as-needed and per-deck basis. And if you have numerous charts across multiple slides, I would suggest using layouts with chart or content placeholders to ensure consistency and alignment.

Chart Templates come with a few limiting caveats, the biggest one being that these .crtx files live locally on your computer only and do not travel with the file the way that masters and color palettes do.­ This means they can be difficult for others to use or to use as part of an overall PowerPoint template. You can locate and send your .crtx files to another user or an IT department to have them placed in the appropriate local folders (see above), but this is obviously a challenging workflow.

Also remember that a Chart Template includes the type of chart itself, so if you apply a bar chart template to an unformatted line chart, you will get a new bar chart. This may or may not make sense for your data, so you may need to create a different chart template for each type of chart you want to pick up formatting from.

And that reminds me, because of the saved auto-calculated axis, our two charts don’t really hold to the best practice of matching scales. I’ll just go in and manually fix the 2017 axis to match that of 2018. Done!

What About Tables?

Sadly, there is no option to save and apply a table template, but the YouTools suite of tools from YouPresent includes a magical format painter for tables. And it works on both Mac and PC!

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Nolan Haims has decades of experience designing visual communications for the largest brands and organizations. He trains organizations to communicate more visually and create compelling stories with data. Nolan speaks at national conferences, writes extensively on visual storytelling, and is one of the co-hosts of the long-running Presentation Podcast. As one of only 15 Microsoft PowerPoint MVPs in the U.S., he regularly advises the PowerPoint development team on the industry standard software. He is the author of thebetterdeckdeck.com and runs his own design consultancy in Montclair, NJ.

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  • Sarah Dukes says:

    What version of Office for Mac is this? I’m contemplating going to Office 365 so I can have more consistent tools with my PC users. More often than not I have to hand template files over to someone else for final data edits before they present on whoknowswhat type of presentation device.

    • Nolan Haims says:

      CRTX files have been around for years so they’ll be available on whatever version you’re on, I’m sure. But I highly recommend moving to Office 365. There are other features only available on O365 and Microsoft will certainly introduce new things only for O365. That’s where everything is moving. Plus, since it’s a subscription, you can install it on Mac or PC and multiple computers.

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