Everything goes as you outline until I plot the second set of data, the bars appear the same as your demonstration chart, but they are not outlined in red. On the next step I have a distorted “Z” pattern. Thanks for the tutorial.

Good point about the formatting. When I make a template for a client, I apply some typical formatting to the worksheet. Any cells requiring input are generally colored light yellow or light green. These will be the only unlocked cells in the sheet, and the worksheet will be protected, usually without a password, so that these are the only cells the user can alter. The rest of the cells stay white background, with simple borders to help guide the user’s thought process. I try to put intermediate calculations off to the side, then I hide all rows and columns outside of the display area (including the calculations). I also lock any charts, but provide buttons that call code to export them to PowerPoint or Word.

In my tutorials, I shade cells to show the function of the data. In this post, for example, I have different colors for series names, category labels (X values), and Y values, etc.

One tangential question: your impressive “templates” typically don’t make it drop-dead obvious which cells are user inputs and which cells are calculations and which cells are ad hoc workarounds, through color scheme or labels or segregation or arrows. Granted, it wasn’t too hard to figure out even for your involved example here, as the inputs logically were all at the top. For reusable workbooks like this which accomplish a task based on the inputs, do you think making the inputs really obvious by some color scheme (etc.) would be worthwhile and practical? Or are inputs best found by examining the F5 [Go To] Special Constants for likely candidates?

The visible and hidden columns are all stacked. The visible columns are based on scaled values, so for the scale, the calculated values range from 0 to 1. Since the columns are all less than 1 in height, the hidden columns have a calculated height that when added to the lower value produces a total of 1. The upper columns then stack on this value.