Using Excel VBA to Label Multiple Series in a Chart
This follow-up article to a previous blog describes how to label the data points in multiple series in Excel using VBA.

You can read the original blog here.  In addition to blogging furiously, we also run courses for businesses in both Excel and VBA.

Posted by Andrew Gould on 30 May 2012

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Using VBA to Label Multiple Series in a Chart

A while ago I wrote a blog describing how you could use VBA in Excel to label the data points in a scatter chart.  Recently someone asked a question about how to adapt the code I created to label more than one series in the same chart.  Here's the problem we're trying to solve:

Data and chart

The chart contains one data series plotting RunTime against Budget and another plotting RunTime against Box Office. We want to label each data point with the name of the film.

The Code to Solve the Problem

The key to this solution is looping over each data series for every data point that we want to label.  The code below will work for any number of data series that the chart contains:

Sub CreateDataLabels()

'variables for looping over chart objects

Dim FilmChart As Chart

Dim FilmDataSeries As Series

'variables for looping over cells

Dim SingleCell As Range

Dim FilmList As Range

'variable to keep track of number of films

Dim FilmCounter As Integer

FilmCounter = 1

Set FilmList = Range("A2", "A11")

Set FilmChart = ActiveSheet.ChartObjects(1).Chart

'loop over each data series and enable data labels

For Each FilmDataSeries In FilmChart.SeriesCollection

FilmDataSeries.HasDataLabels = True

Next FilmDataSeries

'loop over each cell in the list of source data

For Each SingleCell In FilmList

'loop over each series in the chart

For Each FilmDataSeries In FilmChart.SeriesCollection

'change the label text to be the film's name

FilmDataSeries.Points(FilmCounter).DataLabel.Text = SingleCell.Value

Next FilmDataSeries

FilmCounter = FilmCounter + 1

Next SingleCell

End Sub

The End Result

The end result of running this code is that each data point in the chart will be labelled:

Labelled chart

Each data point in the chart now shows the name of the film that it represents.

You can download the completed example for this blog.

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