If you’re looking for a tutorial on breaking an axis scale, you won’t find it here. Instead you’ll read why breaking an axis is a bad idea, and you’ll get a tutorial in Panel Charts, which are a more effective (and easier) means to show your data. The Problem People frequently ask how to show [...]

In Excel, the difference between Line charts and XY charts has nothing to do with formatting the data with or without lines, and everything to do with different behavior of the X axes in the charts. I’ve written about these differences numerous times, in X Axis: Category or Value?, Scatter Chart or Line Chart?, Line-XY [...]

I came across a blog post called Is it just me? (software defaults), which asks the age-old question, Why Are My Excel Bar Chart Categories Backwards? The post was in a new blog by Alex Kerin of Data Driven Consulting. Alex works on projects in analytics and dashboarding. I have been asked this question a [...]

I was recently asked whether Excel can make an axis in which the value of each label was double the previous value, but the labels were equally spaced. I’ve covered custom axis scales several times (see Custom Axis Scales using Dummy Series), and this is simply another example. The specific question was about labels 1, [...]

In Daily Chart: Tax the Rich to Pay For Health Care? Conor Clarke responded to a proposal to pay for health care reform by taxing the rich. He plotted the variation in the effective Federal tax rate paid by the top 1% of households to put into perspective the effect of a few additional percent [...]

In Chart with a Dual Category Axis I showed how to make a chart with dual category labels (two rows of labels). In Individually Formatted Category Axis Labels I showed how to format axis labels individually by ignoring the built in labels and using an invisible series with individually formatted data labels. An attentive reader [...]