After more tinkering, I found that Excel wraps the categories if it has fewer than 14 of them in a single chart. If I add a 14th or beyond, the categories stop wrapping. Not sure if this is by design or a bug, but in any case I decided the simplest solution is to create a second chart and divide the categories across the two. This works for my purposes. Still a puzzling case though.

-Tyler

Thanks for this great site, it’s very helpful!

My question is this: I use multi-category charts in Excel 2007 on a regular basis. In many of mine, I have a large number of categories and each has only two sub-categories. In some cases the category names are long and the sub-categories are not, and I run into an issue where the category names do not wrap, resulting in overlapping letters with the next category. What puzzles me is that some of my charts DO wrap properly. I can’t find any setting for this. Do you know how I can cause my category names to wrap?

Thanks in advance,
-Tyler

I see. In both Excel 2003 SP3 and 2007 SP2, if row 31 is completely blank, or if cell B31 contains a space character, the last item is a subcategory. If A31 contains a space character or a formula that returns “”, Excel recognizes it as a non blank cell in column A and gives it its own category. Select cell A31 and press Delete, and it should fix the axis labels.

Thanks for the response. It’s probably easiest if I show an example:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3440/3994464489_5698777cc9_o.jpg

The last row of the table contains only blank cells, but always shows up on the chart as a new category.

Where is the last empty cell in my table (corresponding to yours)? Do you mean A12? Make sure the cell is really empty, and doesn’t contain for example a stray space character.

I’m having a problem with a chart like the one at the top of the page. For chart formatting reasons, the top and bottom cells in each subcategory group have been left empty (so in your example, B2 would be empty, Gear, Bearing and Motor would be in B3 to B5, B6 would be empty and so on). This works great except for the last empty cell in the table, which Excel treats as a new category instead of a subcategory. Can you suggest any way around this?

If you don’t want different formatting for the different main categories (Mechanical etc.), then move the ‘this year’ data from columns E and G into column C, and the ‘last year’ data from F and H into D, and only use columns C and D for your Y values.

Also thanks for the printer friendly suggestion. I have certainly considered this option, but haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to implement it. One of these days.

Before my main question, here’s a suggestion : Would it be possible to make a “printer friendly ersion” of the page? I like to print some of your pages because I dont have internet on my work computer and I dont need the menus on the left and other stuff.. Thanks :)

Main question:
I am trying to make a dual-axis very similar to yours, but I want to display two numbers for each category. For example, Mechanical-Bearing would have ‘failure rate last year’ and ‘failure rate today’. The problem I have is if I want to display the legend, it shows these 2 variables as many times as I have categories.

Example:
http://ceh.servehttp.com/upload/Classeur1.xls

(Here, I would like all the ‘failure rate this year’ to be a color, the ‘failure rate last year’ to be another and to have only 2 options in the legend, not 2*3..

any idea?
Thanks
Simon

It just occurred to me that Excel 2007 has a problem if there are more than (I think) 99 category labels. Above this number, you no longer have any control over how the labels are displayed.

You might try to use a alternate approach, Individually Formatted Dual Category Labels, which uses data label on invisible series instead of the built-in axis labels. Excel will put all of the labels wherever they go, no matter whether they overlap. So it will get around Excel 2007’s problems with too many category labels.