Picture fills can look great and distracting at the same time, it all depends upon the type of picture you use for the fill, and
also what you fill with a picture. If you end up using a picture as a fill for your chart's Plot Area, then you must put in plenty of
thought before you decide to do so. Why? Because you don't want to crowd your chart, and so while you can use a picture, it's best to use
one that's muted and does not attract too much attention.
Note: Other fill types that you can apply to the Plot Area of a chart include a
solid color, a
gradient, a
texture, or a
pattern and also a
picture fill (explained on this page).
Follow these steps to learn more:
- Select the chart that you want to format the Plot Area for. If you don't have a chart,
insert a new chart.
- Now, carefully right-click (or Ctrl+click) the
Plot Area, from the resultant menu, select the
Format Plot Area option, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Format Plot Area option
- This summons the Format Plot Area dialog box, as shown in Figure 2. Make sure that the Fill
option is selected within the sidebar (highlighted in red within Figure 2). Then select the
Picture or Texture tab (highlighted in blue within Figure 2), within this tab, click
the Choose Picture button, highlighted in green within Figure 2.
Figure 2: Picture or Texture tab within the Format Plot Area dialog box
- This will bring up the Choose a Picture dialog box as shown in Figure 3. In this dialog box, navigate
to the folder where the picture to be used as fill is located, select it, and click the Insert button.
Figure 3: Choose a Picture dialog box
- This will take you back to the Format Plot Area dialog box, where you can now see the selected picture in the preview
area, shown highlighted in red within Figure 4.
Figure 4: Picture fill chosen for the Plot Area Fill
- At this point, you can make some more changes to the picture fill using the other options in the Format Plot Area
dialog box as explained below:
i. If you want to change the transparency of the picture fill, you can use the Transparency slider that you can see
in Figure 4.
ii. If you want the picture used as a fill to be tiled, select the Tile check-box which you can see in
Figure 4. By using this option you can make any picture to behave like a texture. To learn more about how to fill the
Plot Area with a texture fill, refer to our
Apply Texture Fills to Plot
Area of Charts in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac tutorial.
Note: Even though the Rotate with shape check-box is available for selection within the
Format Plot Area dialog box, selecting/deselecting it won't make any difference to the picture fill. This is because you can't
rotate the Plot Area.
- Once you have made all required selections in the Format Plot Area dialog box, click the OK button to get back
to the slide where you can see the selected Plot Area filled with selected picture, as shown in Figure 5. We know this
looks a little over the top, and we will mellow this down!
Figure 5: Plot Area applied with a picture fill
- At this stage, if you feel that the picture is looking too prominent, you can adjust it's transparency to make it look muted. In
Figure 6 you can see that we have set the transparency of the selected picture fill to 80% (highlighted in
red).
Figure 6: Picture fill's transparency set to 80%
- Figure 7 shows our sample chart's Plot Area after we changed the transparency of the picture fill to 80% (compare with
Figure 5).
Figure 7: Plot Area applied with a picture fill that has 80% transparency
- Save your presentation often.
See Also: Apply Picture
Fills to Plot Area of Charts in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows
