Changing Fonts and Other Text Options for Charts in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Even though charts are a visual medium, they still contain plenty of text in the form of data labels, titles, legend, axis labels, etc. Whenever you insert a new chart (or any other slide element), the default colors and fonts that are used are based on the active Theme of the presentation. In this tutorial you are going to learn how you can change the font and use other text options for charts in PowerPoint 2010:

Select the chart that contains some text you want to change the font for. Learn how to insert a chart in PowerPoint 2010 if you don’t have one on your slide. The chart may look like what you can see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Chart selected in PowerPoint 2010
When you select the chart, you'll find that the entire chart area gets selected (refer to Figure 1). If you want to access the change options for a particular chart element, you have to select that element by clicking on it. Alternatively, you can select any chart element from the Chart Tools Layout / Format tab of the Ribbon. For now, click on the Horizontal Category Axis (the horizontal line at the bottom of the plot area) within your chart, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Horizontal Category Axis selected
Thereafter, choose any of these three options to change the font and text formatting:
1. Access the Home tab of the Ribbon and choose any of the options in the Font group, as shown in Figure 3 (highlighted in red ).
  
  Figure 3: Font group within Home tab of the Ribbon
2. Right click on the Horizontal Category Axis and select the Font option from the context menu that comes up as shown in Figure 4.
  
  Figure 4: Font option selected
  
  This will open the multi-tabbed Font dialog box that you can see in Figure 5. Make sure you activate the Font tab of this dialog. Some of the options in the Font group (refer to above Figure 3) are not included in the Font dialog box, primarily, the option to add shadow to the text.
  
  Figure 5: Font dialog box
3. Finally, you can right click on the Horizontal Category Axis to bring up the mini toolbar (that you can see highlighted in red in Figure 4). Most of the options within the mini toolbar can be found in the Font group as well as in the Font dialog box.
After making required changes to the text on the Horizontal Category Axis, save your presentation.