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Only 6 colors for Keynote charts? Can’t edit colors?

I was making a chart in Kenote with 8 datasets on a modern version of Keynote, when I noticed that 2 datasets had identical colors with the other 2 datasets (green and blue). It’s a problem, because there’s no way to distinguish between these datasets on the slide using legend.

I tried different color schemes, and discovered that none of them had more than 6 different colors.

I didn‘t find any way to assign arbitrary colors to the dataset, so I went googling.

I found a question from user opnightfall1771, who encountered the same problem as early as in 2011.

Today’s official Apple article on Apple Support about customizing charts doesn’t appear to mention chart colors customization. Moreover, it even has an example of a pie chart with 8 datasets, which has 2 identical greens and 2 identical blues!

Now, I understand that this issue can be addressed by simply using labels instead of legend. maybe not allowing more than 6 colors in a chart was intentional, because the designer didn’t want charts to look chaotic. But isn’t it common sense to at least allow the user to assign colors to chart datasets when it’s necessary?

Posted on Apr 23, 2018 12:23 AM

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Posted on Apr 23, 2018 10:57 AM

  • click the chart ton the slide to select
  • click one of the bars to select
  • Inspector > Format > Style
  • click on the colour picker circle to open the colour picker

User uploaded file


click on the colour selection circle to select a colour, then drag the patch onto the chart:

User uploaded file

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Only 6 colors for Keynote charts? Can’t edit colors?

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