One of my most popular blog posts of all times is Clustered-Stacked Column Charts. This post has received the most visits and is the most heavily commented post I’ve written. One reader wants to know how to add vertical lines between the clusters. This is an adaptation of the technique in Add a Vertical Line [...]

In Plot your data around the clock, Chandoo proposed a complicated bubble chart to show website traffic vs. time of day.

I thought it was daring of Chandoo to try such a unique treatment of the data, but I found the bubbles difficult to interpret, and it was distracting that I had to look from chart [...]

Excel offers clustered column charts and stacked column charts among its standard options.

A common request is for a clustered-stacked column chart where the columns are clustered together, while one or more of the clustered columns are divided into sections stacked on top of each other. This isn’t built into Excel, but by rearranging the worksheet [...]

In yesterday’s post, Add a Target Line, I showed how to add a simple horizontal line target indicator to a chart. What if your target isn’t constant. I’m not talking about your boss’ moving target, but a case illustrated by the following dummy data. Our company makes widgets, which are more popular in spring and [...]

Usually in order to characterize plotted data more completely, it helps to add a target line to your chart. There are a number of ways to do this in an Excel chart. If your chart is a column chart, you can add another column series, you can add a line series that spans the middle [...]

There has been a lot of discussion here lately about XY and Line charts:

Line Charts vs. XY Charts
Line-XY Combination Charts
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 1
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 2
Order of Points in XY and Line Charts

Many of these posts have described differences between XY and [...]

There has been a lot of discussion here lately about XY and Line charts:

Line Charts vs. XY Charts
Line-XY Combination Charts
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 1
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 2

One interesting thing about a line chart with a date scale X axis is the order of the [...]

When people think of an Excel combination chart, they usually think of a chart with lines and columns, or something similar that they found on the list of “Built-In Custom” chart types (I just love that oxymoron). However, line and XY series are types that combine to make decent charts. The line chart’s Date Scale [...]

Sometimes it helps a time series chart if you can highlight certain periods with a different color background. You may want to show financial performance over time, for example, and point out the periods when the economy was in a recession. In this example, I will use a simpler example, plotting the readership of this [...]

Excel offers clustered column charts and stacked column charts among its standard options.

A common request is to make a column chart where the columns are clustered together, while one or more of the clustered columns are divided into sections stacked on top of each other. This isn’t built into Excel, but by rearranging the worksheet [...]