Once the chart is on the page, the next step is to use the built-in Wizard to customize its appearance. To do so, right-click the chart and select Chart Wizard. This will bring up the wizard so you can select the chart type you want, the number of series and their appearance, the axes, titles, and so on.

You can also use the Properties window to set properties such as the chart’s BackColor and ChartStyle.

The Wizard and Properties window are powerful enough to customize virtually every aspect of the chart without writing any code at all. You can even use the Wizard to populate the chart with data, but that is rarely practical except to play with ranges and number of points and get a feel for the final look of the data.

After the chart is configured, you can save it to a file. This is useful so you can reuse this layout later in other charts. To do so, right-click the chart and select Save Chart. To re-use the layout later, right-click another chart and select Load Chart. You can define as many of these chart layouts as you want, and use them as templates to achieve a consistent look for all charts throughout your applications. You can even load chart layouts at run time using the LoadChartFromFile method.

For more details on how to configure charts and use the Chart Wizard, see Design-Time Tools for Creating 2D Charts.