Comments on: Clustered and Stacked Column and Bar Charts

By: Ellen

Ellen — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:41:03 +0000

Jon,
I am stuck on my chart. It’s almost the way I want it, thanks to your tutorial, but not quite perfect yet. It seems the problem has to do with my “labels”, which are dates. I cannot get the labels to line up underneath the columns. And it would be really nice is the last label/date, 1/31/12, would display along the axis. Can you help?? Thanks in advance!

Here’s a picture of my chart and my data:

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/dob26

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:36:17 +0000

Hans -

You could develop a chart that has some bars on the first axis and other bars on the second axis, but you’re asking for trouble. No matter how clever you are indicating which bars go with which axes, people will be confused.

It would be better to normalize the different classes of data, for example, % of target, or % of highest overall monthly value.

By: HansL

HansL — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:41:29 +0000

Your example shows data on one axis representing dollars(budget). Is it possible to develop a clustered stacked chart whereby you might have dollars as one stacked column next to, say, a stacked column representing units sold with data data on a secondary vertical axis.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:22:36 +0000

Hi Naomi -

Unfortunately you can’t use a pivot table directly in this technique, nor can you turn a pivot chart into a clustered-stacked chart.

What you can do is copy the pivot table, then paste special-link on a new sheet (so if the pivot data changes, this data will adapt). Then follow this technique to make your chart.

By: Naomi Oyemwense

Naomi Oyemwense — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:45:52 +0000

Jon,

Hi! It is 7:43 p.m., and I am so stuck!!! I am using excel 2003, and I have used a pivot table in order to create a stacked graph. I’m not sure how to include “space characters” in my raw data in order to add additional spaces/separators in my graph. Basically, I’m trying to make a stacked graph into a stacked and clustered graph by adding in blank spaces. Is there anyway that I can do this?

Thanks,

Naomi

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:25:13 +0000

Reggee -

Check the comment right above yours. A single bar clustered next to a stack of bars is really just a stack of 1. Sounds like you want to use the single bar like a benchmark (or target), use the second example.