Comments on: Fill Below an XY Chart Series (XY-Area Combo Chart)

By: haberler

haberler — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:52:06 +0000

I ended up doing this with my version of the Line/Area chart. Since the area chart in the XY/Area combo has to be scaled to the precision of the XY chart, it amounts to the same thing…with less work.

By: David Montgomery

David Montgomery — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:19:49 +0000

Thanks Jon! I think I overshot the comment section I wanted though, I meant to respond to the post above this one.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:04:57 +0000

David – Nice article. Thanks for expanding on this technique.

By: David Montgomery

David Montgomery — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:48:41 +0000

Hi Jon, Great post! I got the chart to work just fine, but I ended up modifying it slightly. The data that I would plot on a chart like this tends to intersect quite a bit, so I wanted to use different colors for positive and negative area. I'm sure there is an easier way to do this (maybe in the sister post you were referring to?), but I ended up calculating the points where the lines intersected using SLOPE() and INTERCEPT(). It gets a little ugly, but I put an explanation and the workbook up on my blog if anyone is interested: Two Color XY -Area Combo Chart The end result turned out pretty well, and I haven't played with it too much but all of the formulas should be scalable.

By: Colin Banfield

Colin Banfield — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:58:01 +0000

In creating the “scaling” range from the original dataset, you could use a formula to check the extremes of the dataset to determine how to scale (multiply or divide). I tend to agree with you that line and XY charts should be combined (after all, the date axis is a whole number numeric axis). It would certainly save a lot of hassle when making combo charts.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:29:07 +0000

Jeff’s scaling trick is clever, and works in many cases where the axis values can be invisibly scaled by a thousand or a million. It also only works in Excel 2003 up to an X value of 2,958,465; after this the date-scale axis reverts to a category axis (though formatting the scale of the axis still brings up the date scaling dialog). I guess if the X values are this high, you could divide by 1000.

By: Colin Banfield

Colin Banfield — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:21:55 +0000

“Also I see that your scaling formula does the same thing as in my suggestion of multiplying the X series by 1000…the only difference being that I handle the implications of this to the x axis by using a custom number format to rescale the axis, wheras you add another axis.”

By: Colin Banfield

Colin Banfield — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:27:59 +0000

“The problem with the Area/Line approach (left) is that the X values are all truncated to the next lower whole number value by the line and area series, while the XY series (big and red) considers fractional parts of its inputs (right):”

Yes, I expected that there would be a difference because the date axis only gives us full days (whole numbers). However, I didn’t realize how much of a difference there was between the two approaches until I did a close comparison. Because the numbers are small, the decimals takes on significance.

The moral of this exercise is that the area/line chart is OK in the limited case of whole numbers (or if the decimals aren’t significant or if you can round up the numbers…until such time as Excel gets a date axis that can handle fractions of a day). The XY/area is the way to go if decimal precision is important. It’s certainly a great solution.

By: Bill Gates

Bill Gates — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:10:24 +0000

The one TRUE path, Jon…

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:32:04 +0000

In 2003 and earlier, it was pretty easy to manipulate the XY component of a combo chart, but in 2007 it’s more entangled. A lot of my old tutorials fall down, becuase while 2003 allowed you to pursue several different paths to a final solution (it was path-independent), 2007 often will only work following one path.