Everything’s obvious when you know how it’s done.

For the neutral response, I use two columns, one with half the value, negative, placed before the moderate negative response, the other with half the value, positive, before the moderate positive response.

How would you deal with a neutral response that would be half positive and half negative? Thanks in advance.

Arrange your data as shown below, with negative responses given as negative numbers, somewhat dissatisfied before satisfied (so the responses are out of order). Select the data and create a stacked bar chart. You’ll have to reverse the order of categories on the vertical axis.

I’ve been looking everywhere how to make the first chart as you show in your post dated May 2, 2008 at 6:36 pm using Excel. I have a level of satisfaction scale that ranges from extremely satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, and extremely dissatisfied. I would like the Y=0 in between the two Somewhats, with the positive moving to the right and negative to the left. Is there a simple way to achieve this in Excel? Thanks

The simple stacked % bar charts (with color coding) are scaled to cumulative %, which tends to be very useful if the categories are ordinal but worthless if the categories are nominal. You can’t read cumulative % directly from your favorite clustered column chart’s scale. Depends what you want to show.