When making a chart in Excel, how do I put a heading at the top of the page?

Insert -> Header & Footer

You can do what @tom_g suggests, or make line 1 your heading, merge the cells and center the words if you want to center the heading. You can make line 2 blank to provide space between the heading and the table you created. Get rid of the grid lines on those top two lines and it will look like a heading.

The easiest and most visible – and easy-to-edit – way to accomplish what you want is to insert however many rows you want (for various lines of text in different fonts, colors, etc.). Next, select all of the cells in a row, right-click the selection and Format Cells / Alignment / “Center Across Selection”. (Most people use “Merge Cells”, which is a really bad idea – which you can learn about as you learn more in Excel. For now try to take my word for it: Align / Center Across Selection is a great way to accomplish what you want.)

When the sheet becomes more than one page long, as lists tend to do in Excel, then change the Print Settings to be sure that “Rows at top of page” is selected as 1:4 (if you want the top 4 rows to repeat on every printed page).

@CWOTUS If you only align in one cell, without merging the cells, then if her columns are different sizes the heading won’t be in the middle of thr page. Or, am I missing something?

Here’s the part you missed, @JLeslie:

select all of the cells in a row, right-click the selection and Format Cells / Alignment / “Center Across Selection”

I could have been clearer: “Select the four cells in the row above the data columns” instead of “all of the cells in a row”.

Not enough people are aware of “Center Across Selection”. It’s a beautiful alignment setting. “Merge” makes it nearly impossible to do things with columns (or rows) that have merged cells anywhere in them.

Answers have been covered above; I’ll just add to it some tips.

First, let us know how you are going to use it, print or just show it within excel. For printing, @tom_g‘s way may be easier. But if you want to show it on computer or alike, then @CWOTUS and @JLeslie have pointed out you the easier way, which is an advantage of Excel. You may still use headers, but you need to see the page layout view (you can’t see header in normal or page break view). If you are unsure of what they showed, you may want to see this video…make better headers.

You can also do it without merging cells, which I’d prefer if you are going to use filters, pivot tables, or VBA programming on it. You can increase indent of the text to push it right.

If you have Excel 2007 or newer version, then there are many formatting options available to choose from. There are Cell Styles on the home tab; you can find different title and heading styles in there.

@CWOTUS Got it. Thanks.

I did it yesterday (Friday). I used @tom_g‘s suggestion. I am thanking you all for your input and giving GA’s to all.

Oh, one thing to add: When you speak to people about “chart” and “Excel” then Excel gurus are going to be thinking of what you would call a “graph”.

So keep that in mind: “Excel chart” = “graph”. In Excel, a ChartSheet, which is an Excel programming object, is not a Workheet where you can enter data and type in other information (the kind of sheet you were describing in your question). A ChartSheet is one that is dedicated to producing / displaying a “chart”, which is ExcelSpeak for “a graph”. Charts can also be objects on worksheets, but they are generally not directly editable, not a data entry table.

I understood from your description what you meant… which was “a table”. Just keep it in mind if you have to ask questions of knowledgeable Excel users. Saying “chart” will have them thinking in a totally different direction than what you were describing above.

Since you did it as a proper Header, one thing to remember – if you need to make changes and update things don’t forget to update the header. Since you won’t see it until you print it, it can be easy to forget updating.

When you want to get fancy with Headers and Footers in Excel you can use a BeforePrint macro to present the user with a dialog box that will accept a user-entered string to replace the current header.

For example: I have a workbook maintained by others for staffing on various projects. The sheet is issued more or less monthly. When I print it, I want it to say “Project Staffing for MMMMM” where “MMMMM” is the month in question. (I don’t want it to be a simple [&Date] value, which would be “today’s date”.) And in the past I have ALWAYS forgotten to update the header, so I end up wasting the first print, because it shows an outdated header.

So my current Workbook BeforePrint macro looks something like (this is VERY quick and dirty, and Fluther doesn’t allow the indents to make the code look the least bit pretty):

Private Sub Workbook_BeforePrint(Cancel As Boolean)
MyHdr = InputBox(“Enter the Report’s Month”, “Report Month Input”, _
Application.Text(Now(), “Mmmm”))
’ The “Application.Text(Now(), “Mmmm”)) presents “This Month” spelled out, in case that’s
’ really what I want (it’s always possible). (These are comment lines you could leave in place.)
With ActiveSheet.PageSetup
.LeftHeader = “My Report for ” & MyHdr
End With
End Sub

If you really want Excel advice, I strongly recommend MrExcel.com, which has much more knowledgeable experts than me (but it also has me) and much better tools for asking and displaying the information you need.