The default settings in Excel spit out pretty terrible looking charts. But it’s not too difficult to turn something like this:

Into something more like this:

Note the specific steps for the transformation:

• The move from a legend to direct labeling
• The reduction of excessive axes lines and tick mark labels to reduce visual clutter
• Highlighting the data of interest and de-emphasizing the others
• Adding the headline, text, and source

Follow this tutorial from Storytelling with Data to see the step-by-step guide that took the default graph style to its more refined, and ultimately more effective, finished state.

Finally: an animated GIF of the process of stripping away unnecessary graphics to focus on the data and the message: