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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]