What Is a .CRTX File? Excel Chart Templates Explained (+ Free Downloads)

If a colleague emailed you a file ending in .crtx and double-clicking it did nothing, that’s working as intended. A .crtx file is an Excel chart template — a saved bundle of formatting that you apply to a chart from inside Excel, not a file you open on its own. It exists for one reason, and it’s a good one: so you never have to re-format the same chart twice.

Here’s the short version. You spend twenty minutes getting a chart exactly right — the colors, the fonts, the axis, the gridlines, the legend position, all of it. Instead of rebuilding that from scratch next quarter, you save it once as a .crtx and apply it in two clicks forever after. That’s the whole idea, and almost nobody uses it.

What a .CRTX file actually stores

A .crtx (the name stands for Chart Template — XML) captures the look and the chart type of a chart, so it can stamp both onto a completely different dataset later. It holds the chart type (column, line, pie, combo, and so on), the color scheme, axis formatting and scale settings, gridline and tick-mark choices, the legend and title styling, series formatting like fill and border, and data-label formatting.

What it does not store is your data. A template is a costume, not a body — you point it at new numbers and it dresses them up in the saved formatting. One important quirk: a chart template saves the exact colors that were in use when you created it, tied to the theme active at the time. Apply that template in a workbook using a different theme and you’ll get the template’s original colors, not the new workbook’s theme colors. That’s usually what you want for brand consistency, but it surprises people who expect the chart to re-theme itself.

Under the hood, a .crtx is a ZIP archive of XML (open one in a text editor and the first two bytes are PK, the ZIP signature). You’ll never need to touch that, but it explains why double-clicking does nothing — there’s no standalone app that renders a chart template. Excel is the only thing that reads it, and only from inside its chart dialogs.

How to create a .CRTX file (save your chart as a template)

This is the part worth learning, because it takes about ten seconds once your chart looks right.

1. Format a chart until it’s exactly how you want your standard to look — type, colors, fonts, axes, the works.
2. Right-click anywhere on the chart and choose Save as Template.
3. In the dialog, give it a clear name. The file type is already set to Chart Template Files (*.crtx) — leave it.
4. Click Save.

By default Excel drops the file into its Charts template folder automatically, which is what makes it show up as an option next time you insert a chart. In current versions (Microsoft 365, Excel 2024, 2021, 2019, 2016) that folder lives at:

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Charts\

You don’t have to memorize that path — Excel handles it for you — but you’ll want it in a moment for sharing.

A word of advice most tutorials skip: save a separate template for each chart type you use often. Because a .crtx bakes in the chart type, one template can’t cover your column charts and your line charts. Build a small library — one for columns, one for lines, one for your combo report chart — rather than hunting for a single template that does everything. It won’t exist.

How to apply a .CRTX to a chart

Two situations come up, and Excel handles them in two different places.

Applying it to a brand-new chart: Select your data, go to Insert > Charts, click the small arrow to open All Charts, and choose the Templates folder at the top of the left-hand list. Your saved templates appear there — click one and insert.

Applying it to an existing chart: Select the chart, go to Chart Design > Change Chart Type, open All Charts, and again pick Templates. Excel restyles the current chart with the template’s formatting and switches it to the template’s chart type in one move.

If your template isn’t showing up in either place, it’s almost always because the .crtx isn’t sitting in the Charts folder — which is exactly the problem when someone sends you one by email.

How to open a .CRTX file someone sent you

You can’t open it directly, and you shouldn’t try. To use a .crtx that arrived from a colleague, you install it rather than open it:

1. In Excel, go to Insert > Charts > All Charts, right-click the Templates folder, and choose Manage Templates. That opens the Charts folder in Windows Explorer.
2. Copy the received .crtx file into that folder.
3. Close and reopen the Insert Chart or Change Chart Type dialog. The template now appears in Templates, ready to apply.

That “Manage Templates” button is the shortcut worth remembering — it drops you straight into the correct folder without typing the path.

How to share a .CRTX across a team

This is where chart templates earn their keep, and where most teams miss an easy win. If everyone in a department applies the same .crtx, every chart across every report comes out with identical colors, fonts, and formatting — no more one analyst’s charts looking nothing like another’s.

To share one: grab the .crtx from your Charts folder (use Manage Templates to find it fast), and send it however you’d send any file — email, Teams, a shared drive. Each recipient copies it into their Charts folder using the same Manage Templates trick. From then on, it sits in their template gallery alongside their own.

For a genuinely consistent house style, a shared drive folder of approved .crtx files beats emailing them around. New team members copy the lot into their Charts folder on day one and every chart they build matches the standard.

Free chart template downloads to get you started

Rather than hand you finished .crtx files — which would carry our colors and force you to strip them out — we’ve built something more useful: a starter workbook of four clean, pre-formatted charts (a column chart, a line chart, a horizontal bar chart, and a pie chart) sitting on sample data.

Open it, tweak the colors and fonts to match your own brand, then right-click each chart and Save as Template. Two clicks and you’ve got your own .crtx library, styled the way you want, not the way we did. That’s a better outcome than downloading a stranger’s formatting and reverse-engineering it.

If you’d rather your templates do more than store formatting — think one-click waterfall charts, bullet charts, or Gantt-style visuals Excel doesn’t ship natively — that’s the territory of chart add-ins rather than plain templates. We’ve tested the current crop in our guide to the best Excel chart add-ins, and the honest answer for most people is that you don’t need one. But some genuinely earn their price.

When a template isn’t the right tool

Chart templates are brilliant for formatting reuse. They’re the wrong tool when what you actually want is a chart type Excel doesn’t have, or a chart wired to live data. A .crtx can’t invent a waterfall bridge or a Sankey diagram out of thin air — it can only save formatting you’ve already built. If you’re trying to standardize a chart Excel makes awkwardly, build it once properly first (our waterfall chart in Excel walkthrough is a good example of getting the base chart right), then save that as your template.

And if you’re not yet sure which chart type belongs on the page at all, formatting is premature. Sort the chart choice first — our guide to which chart you should use walks through it by data type — and save the template once you know the answer.

Frequently asked questions

Can I open a .crtx file by double-clicking it? No. There’s no standalone application for chart templates. You use a .crtx from inside Excel’s Insert Chart or Change Chart Type dialogs, under the Templates folder. To install one you received, copy it into your Charts template folder first.

Where does Excel store .crtx files? In C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Charts\ for Excel 2016 through Microsoft 365. The quickest way to get there is Insert > Charts > All Charts > right-click Templates > Manage Templates, which opens the folder directly.

Does a chart template save my data too? No — only the chart type and formatting. You apply it to your own data, and the template restyles that data without changing the numbers.

Why do my template’s colors look wrong in a new workbook? They’re not wrong — they’re the exact colors saved with the template, which override the current workbook’s theme colors. That’s by design, to keep charts consistent across files. If you want a chart to pick up a new workbook’s theme instead, build it fresh rather than applying a template.

Do .crtx files work in Word and PowerPoint? Yes. Chart templates apply across Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, since all four share the same charting engine. A template saved in Excel appears in the Templates folder in the others too.

Can I edit a .crtx file directly? Not usefully. It’s a ZIP of XML, so it opens in an archive tool, but hand-editing chart XML is error-prone and pointless. The supported way to change a template is to apply it to a chart, adjust the chart, and save a new template over the old one.