Excel Tips & Tricks: The XY Chart Labeler

If your job requires a lot of analysis and Excel isn’t your best friend, odds are you need to get to know Excel better. In addition to rich internal capabilities there are dozens of free or inexpensive add-ins that allow you to do many things in Excel that most users are not aware of. One of our favorites is the XY Chart Labeler, a free add-in available at appspro.com that allows you to add names to data points in Excel charts. One of the most prevalent uses we find for it actually refers back to our last blog entry – the Price Outlier framework.

Normally we’d have thousands of customer/product situations, but in this example pretend we have 17 customers for a given product and we want to identify graphically which customers have pricing below the price/volume curve we typically see for a product. We start with a table of basic information.

When graphing the data we clearly see that two customers have pricing that falls below where we’d expect it to be given their volume – but we don’t know which two. We could easily check out customer prices and volumes to see who these customers are, but if we wanted to make a presentation to a business leader highlighting the fact that pricing outliers are a problem it would take forever to make 10-15 slides by product and adding in the customer names manually.


This is where XY Chart Labeler becomes our best friend for a day. With just a few clicks, the add-in allows you to select a column to bring in as data labels – in this case we want customer name. By adding those in we can clearly see that Delawhat Contracting and Get Started Painting are the two customers whose pricing might not be optimized today.


For more Excel tips and tricks please check back with us soon – there are dozens of capabilities you might not be aware of that can cut your analysis time in half – if not more. Until then if you have any questions feel free to contact us anytime.