The chart is a regular Excel chart, with a data layout which is tedious to set up manually. The utility lays out the data automatically and creates the chart. After that, the chart remains unchanged, unless of course someone edits it. Whether the utility is present or not has no effect on its subsequent appearance.

There’s no commercial version of Rob’s Chart Labeler, though others sell similar products. I haven’t tried any of these other labelers, but I doubt they’re as comprehensive or well-built as Rob’s. Rob did release a version that works with 2007, but that was some time ago, so you probably have it if you downloaded it after reading my article.

Can you get any labels to appear where you want your custom labels? Select the series, go to Data Labels on the Chart Tools > Layout tab, and add any type of labels to the chart.

Mike

Thank you once again. Your help is priceless!

You can follow the same protocol, though you need to be watchful of the details. In this example, note that I have blank columns outside each end of the data (B and J) and blank columns between each stacked block (E and G). The two stacks for Jan are in C and D, the one stack for Feb is in F, and the two for Mar are in H and I.

The month labels don’t really match up here, but it’s not far off. You may need to use another technique to produce these labels, though, using a hidden XY series and its data labels.

is it possible to have several clustered-stacked columns for one category, and then only one stacked column for others? For example, category 1 has 2 clustered bars that are both stacked, category 2 only has one, category 3 has 2, etc. Also, I need the clustered-stacked columns in each category to be closer together than the rest of the categories. Is that possible to plot in one graph?

Thanks!

Anything that you can do, you could in principle program in VBA. You need to start with a compact data range, lay it out in a sparse array with a particular arrangement, then spit out a chart. The challenge is to make the VBA program as smart as you arem when it comes to knowing how best to lay out the data.

I’ve thought about writing a utility to do this, and on a recent plane trip I even sketched it out. There hasn’t been enough time of the free variety for me to work on it beyond that, especially since I have to waste so much time sleeping. Someday….

Is it possible to make a chart like this dynamic? I am trying to make a clustered-stacked column chart that can have anywhere from 8 to 30 “main categories”. Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.

Your tutorials are a life saver. Thank you for your time and dedication.

The first method will break down if the cluster arrangement is more complicated (e.g., some months have four weeks, some have five).

If the Y axis max is 70, and the error bar length is 70, they ought to match up. Make sure you only have a primary Y axis, not a secondary Y axis with a non-fixed maximum scale.