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How to Label a Legend in Google Sheets

When working with charts in Google Sheets there may be times where you want to add label legends to make your graphs easier to read.

This is pretty simple to do.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to add and edit label legends in Google Sheets.

Table of Contents

How to Add a Label Legend

To create a legend, first, we must create a chart:

1. Highlight the data range that will be used to create the chart

chart-legend-1c

2. In the top menu, select Insert

chart-legend-2

3. From the drop-down menu, select Chart

chart-legend-3

You should now see your chart is created. You can always edit the type of chart that is display through the chart editor, but for this example, I will keep it as a basic pie chart.

chart-legend-4c

You may have noticed that this chart has been created without any legends. It is not very clear what this data is. We can add label legends to the chart to make it more clear.

Here are the steps:

1. Navigate over to the chart editor and select Setup. If the chart editor is not open, double click on your chart and you should see it appear on the right side of your screen

label-legend-1

2. Under the Label section select Add label. Select the range that contains your data

label-legend-2

3. You will now see your chart is labeled with the data.

label-legend-3

You can remove the label by selecting the three-dot menu and selecting remove

remove-label

Altnertaviely you can both add and remove labels by checking the “Use column A as labels” box at the bottom of the Setup tab.

Use column as labels

How to Edit a Legend

Legend Text

You can also edit the text of a label legend manually by double-clicking the chart. This will open up a text box where you can enter whatever you want to label the data.

Manually label legend

Legend Positioning

The positioning of the legend can be changed by selecting the customize tab and then navigating down to the legend area.

From here, select the drop-down called Position and you will find options for changing the position of the legend to:

  • None
  • Top
  • Bottom
  • Left
  • Right
  • Inside
  • Labeled
  • Auto

legend position

Here is an example of the chart with the legend on top

legend top position

One thing to note is that when changing the position of your legend, the percentages won’t display. You need to make sure your legend is labeled otherwise it won’t display any data in your legend.

Legend Formatting

You can also change the formatting of the text of your legend.

That is also done through the customize tab. Navigate down to the legend section and you will find options for changing the font, font size, format, and text color of your legend.

legend font

Closing Thoughts

Adding a label legend to your charts is important for having easy-to-understand data. It’s relatively easy to customize your chart by adding a legend and editing the positioning and formatting of your legend.

This should help to make your graphs easier to read.

In general though, if you set your data up with labeled columns and headers before you create your chart, you shouldn’t need to spend as much time editing your legend because the chart will be created with all the relevant information.

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Make a Histogram
How to Add a Secondary Y-Axis to a Chart
How to Make a Scatter Plot