Purpose — to add a data label to just ONE POINT on a chart in Excel

There are situations where you want to annotate a chart line or bar with just one data label, rather than having all the data points on the line or bars labelled.

---

Method — add one data label to a chart line

Steps shown in the video above:

1. Click on the chart line to add the data point to.
2. All the data points will be highlighted.
3. Click again on the single point that you want to add a data label to.
4. Right-click and select ‘Add data label‘
5. This is the key step! Right-click again on the data point itself (not the label) and select ‘Format data label‘.
6. You can now configure the label as required — select the content of the label (e.g. series name, category name, value, leader line), the position (right, left, above, below) in the Format Data Label pane/dialog box.
7. To format the font, color and size of the label, now right-click on the label and select ‘Font‘.

Note: in step 5. above, if you right-click on the label rather than the data point, the option is to ‘Format data labelS‘ – i.e. plural. When you then start choosing options in the ‘Format Data Label‘ pane, labels will be added to all the data points.