The Chart Style Configurator defines a chart design pattern: which settings every new chart should get, so nobody has to re-apply the house look by hand on every slide.
Opening it
presentaid ribbon → About → Expert Tools → Chart Style Configurator.
The most important rule: everything is opt-in
Each block in the form has its own "Apply …" tick, and everything to the right of it stays greyed out until you tick it.
A block you do not tick is not touched at all - the chart keeps whatever your deck's template gives it. This is deliberate, and it is not the same as switching the setting off:
| What you set | What happens to a new chart |
|---|---|
| "Apply title settings" unticked | The title is left exactly as the template made it |
| "Apply title settings" ticked, "Show title" unticked | The title is actively switched OFF |
What you can define
| Section | Settings |
|---|---|
| Title | Show or hide, font size |
| Value axis (Y) | Show or hide, font size, number format |
| Category axis (X) | Show or hide, font size |
| Legend | Show or hide, position, font size |
| Typeface | One font name for every text element in the chart |
| Data labels | Font size |
| Gridlines | Horizontal and vertical, independently |
| Bars | Gap width in % |
| Series colours | An ordered, repeating palette |
Series colours
The palette is a simple ordered list - series 1 gets the first colour, series 2 the second, and so on. There is deliberately no grouping here, unlike the Colour Pane: in a chart the ORDER is the meaning.
- Add Colour: appends a row.
- Click the swatch to open the same colour picker used across presentaid.
- Drag the ⋮⋮ handle to reorder; a blue line shows where the row will land.
- If a chart has more series than you defined colours, the list repeats from the top.
- On a pie or doughnut the palette colours the slices, since a pie is a single series.
If you define no palette
Colours are the one setting with a fallback. A chart inserted through presentaid with no palette configured gets the presentaid house colours - a deep navy, a teal, a pale blue and a pale green - rather than whatever accents your deck's theme happens to carry. It makes a presentaid chart recognisable at a glance.
Define a palette and it wins; untick Series colours and the house colours come back. Every other block behaves as before: not ticked means not touched.
Series added later
When you add a series to an existing chart - through Edit Data, or because a linked Excel range grew - PowerPoint creates it in a theme colour, and the chart ends up with one bar that does not match.
presentaid paints that new series from the palette the next time you select the chart. Each series keeps the colour its position earns, so adding one never reshuffles the colours already on the slide.
Local and Company styles
- Local: your own style, stored in your personal presentaid folder. Always available.
- Company: the shared style, stored in the company library. The tab only appears if a company library is connected and you have write access to it.
The file is called chartstyle.xml and lives either in your local presentaid folder or in the root of the company library. If it is missing or unreadable, presentaid simply behaves as though no style were configured - charts keep PowerPoint's own defaults, apart from the house palette described above.
When the style is applied
Automatically, every time you insert a chart through presentaid.
For the constructed chart types - waterfall, Mekko, pie, scatter, bubble, butterfly - the style is applied after the chart is built, and the construction wins wherever the two disagree. A Mekko, for example, deliberately has no axes, so a style asking for a visible value axis will not bring them back, and a pie ignores the axis and gridline blocks for the same reason.
Series that are deliberately invisible are never coloured: a waterfall's spacer and a Mekko's canvas carry structure, not colour, and painting them would put a phantom bar behind your chart.
Manually, at any time: select a chart, open Chart Properties in the action bar and use Apply Chart Style.
That section also tells you which style is in force - "Using the company style" or "Using your local style" - which is the quickest way to understand why a local change appears to have had no effect.