Change the Name of a Chart in Excel

This allows you to use a more intuitive chart reference when organizing charts using the Selection Pane or within VBA and macros.

Rename a Chart

1. Select the chart.  This should cause three new tabs to appear: Design, Layout, and Format.
   
2. Go to the Layout tab and look all the way to the right where it says Chart Name:
   
   
3. Edit the name of the chart where you see Chart 1 (if you have more charts this will be a higher number)
   
4. That's it!

Now, if we go to the Selection Pane, where you manage objects in the worksheet, you can clearly see "Sales Chart" instead of simply "Chart 1", which wasn't very descriptive.

Notes

If you have one or two charts in the worksheet, renaming the charts is probably not necessary. However, when you have a large spreadsheet with a lot of charts, it is VERY helpful to rename them because it makes organizing them and referencing them later much easier, especially from the Selection Pane, shown above, and from VBA and Macros.

Download the accompanying spreadsheet to see the above example in Excel.