title: Excel, giving data labels to only the top/bottom X% values
body: <p>I have a simple line chart that I've added data labels to:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Q0AA.png" alt="Chart"></p>
  
  <p>But I don't want all those labels. I only want the top and bottom 10% (arbitrary number) values to be shown. For example, in the picture I'd only want the labels for 51, 54, 57, 61, 66, 68, 74 to show. I can manually delete the other labels but the chart data changes dynamically over time. Is there a method for accomplishing this? The text in those labels is a placeholder right now and will eventually be 6-10 characters long, at which point having all those labels will just be a complete mess.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not real confident in VBA so I'd only like to fall back on that as a last resort.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> Thanks to Scott for his insightful answer. It works perfectly with a manually populated Data Labels column. However, some jury rigging is needed if one wants to populate it dynamically. I used the following formula to populate it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>=IF(OR(O1=LARGE($O$1:$O$30,1),O1=LARGE($O$1:$O$30,2),O1=LARGE($O$1:$O$30,3)),O1,"")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Basically, it copies cell values from column O to column P if the value in O is the top 1st, 2nd, or 3rd value in the list. If it's not any of those, it leaves the cell blank. But even if a cell is visually blank, Excel's charting functions interprets the value as 0 if there is a formula in the cell. This means the entire bottom of the graph has repeated data labels of "0%". To solve this I set the value of the FALSE parameter as a negative number and then changed the minimum value on the graph from automatic to 0. This leaves the unfit values below the bottom of the chart, out of visible range.</p>