As everyone else has said, great post!

I follow your method perfectly up until:
“Excel only adds a secondary Y axis, and we need a secondary X axis, with a date scale.”

On following these steps I get a graph which looks very different to yours. I have even resorted to using your data table, to make sure I’m following your method with an identical graph, but still get the same problem.

I am using Excel 2003 SP3… if that makes a difference?

Cheers,
Phil

Now, it still wasn’t correct. So I randomly changed the attributs from second to primery and the other way round and after several changes, I had the right outcome (with date as primary, area as second) , don’t ask me why.

I hope this helps and maybe someone will find out one day, why it behaves that strange…

-Alex

thanks for the great description.
For those who have the same problem as Justin (I had it too):
In colum D I inserted the same values as in A (and filled empty cells with 0′s)
Then followed the steps, but didn’t move the areas to secondary axis.
Converted the 2 lines to xy. After that, I changed the lower x-axis to date axis. Now, I moved all lines and areas to primary axis.
That worked for me; however, it’s not excactly the same anymore and the axis might be labeled differently.

-Alex

Thanks for sharing the great info on your site.

Question for you: I want to add and fill between multiple xy series but desire to maintain fixed values on the y-axis with variations on the x-axis (inverse of your tutorial). Do you know how I can accomplish this?

If this is unclear, my data format is:
x1 x2 x3 x4 y

where the format in the tutorial is:
x y1 y2

This is a simple procedure for an xy plot but I’m having difficulty with the area plot.

Sincerely,
Jacob F

I have used this perfectly with excel 2007 in the past, but can’t get the shading right in excel 2010. the second xy series keeps moving to left corner of the chart when I add secondary horizontal axis. Please help.
Thanks.
VS

The issue was upon saving the spreadsheet and reopening it, the area chart shading moved to a different part of the chart. Obviously, not what I wanted so I went to Chart Tools –> Layout –> Axes and reselected the secondary horizontal axis. The axis showed up above the chart and upon going to Format Axis saw that the Axis type went back to Text axis. Once I switched it back to date axis, the problem was solved.

The only issue I had left was the secondary horizontal axis still in my chart. The easy fix was to go to Chart Tools –> Format –> Word Art Styles and change text color to transparent. Remove the major and minor axis to return the chart back to normal. Now when I save and reopen the chart, the shading works as expected.

It was a pretty interesting error and wanted to share in case another person decided to modify an existing XY chart.