This article is an excerpt from Excel 2007 VBA: Programmer's Reference by John Green, Stephen Bullen, Rob Bovey, and Michael Alexander. Visit Wrox.com to learn more about this book.

In Excel, it is easy to add data labels to a chart as long as the labels are based on the data series values or X-axis values. These options are available in the Layout tab of the Ribbon under the Data Labels button in the Labels group. You can also enter your own text as labels, but this involves a lot of manual work. You would need to add standard labels to the series, and then individually select each one and replace it with your own text. Alternatively, you can write a macro to do it for you.