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Find the name of a chart in Excel

Did you know that whenever you create a chart in Excel a unique name is given to it at the time of creation. This name is not important to you if you are only doing manual work with the data and charts. But knowing the name might be very important if you do any automations related to charts using VBA. Because if we know the name we can directly reference that chart in our codes. So in this post I will show you how to find the name of a chart in Excel.


This excel sheet contains a table and a chart. Now let’s see how to find the name of the chart. To find that, first we need to select the chart of which we need to find the name. Here we have only one chart. If you have more than one, you need to select only the one you want to find the name of.

Above image shows how Excel changed when we selected the chart. It marks the data in the table which is related to the selected chart. And also as you can see two new tabs appeared at the end of the tabs. These two tabs are “DESIGN” and “FORMAT” tabs. To find the name of the chart you need to select the Format tab. Then click on the “Selection Pane” in the “Arrange” group of the Format tab.

When you click on the “Selection Pane”, that pane will appear on the right side of the excel sheet. Also the name of the chart will be highlighted like this.

In this example we have only one chart. But if we have multiple charts then only the selected chart will be highlighted. For an example consider the below image of a Selection Pane. According to this pane this excel sheet has 4 charts and only the “Chart 8” is selected.