I’m going to turn this into a blog post, probably sometime next week.

First I created some large rectangles, and filled them with the colors I want to see in the chart’s background. I made them with 75% transparency, so the actual fill colors are much darker.

I made a stacked bar chart using the quartile data. I only used one row of the data, and each series in the chart has one point, so with a gap width of zero each bar is as thick as the whole chart.

One by one, I copied a colored rectangle, selected a par in the chart, and used Ctrl+V to paste the rectangle as a custom fill image for the chart series.

Now it’s a matter of combining the series. I copied the data of company names and values, selected the chart, pasted special to add the data as a new series. I formatted this added series to place it on the secondary axis.

I used Chart menu >Chart Options > Axes tab to add the secondary category axis, so there are axes all around the chart.

I made sure the primary and secondary horizontal axes had the same scale.

I formatted the primary horizontal axis (bottom) so its corresponding vertical axis crosses at the maximum, and formatted the secondary horizontal axis (top) so its corresponding vertical axis does not cross at the maximum.

I hid the primary vertical axis (right edge) and secondary horizontal axis (top) by choosing None for all display patterns.

I cleaned up the rest of the formatting.

First of all: fantastic site, I had no idea Excel could do all these things!

I have a question which you might be able to help with.

I have plotted two bar charts using the methodology you set out in “Colored Vertical Band Across an Excel Chart”.

One is a stacked bar chart as the background (covering the whole chart) and the other is a bar chart showing actual bars on top of the background.

The only difference between my final chart and yours is your overlaying data is plotted as a stacked bar chart whereas mine is plotted as a normal bar chart.

The problem I have is the gridlines which are hidden behind the stacked bar chart plotted as the background. I need to show them somehow.

I tried to use your arbitrary gridlines example but I couldn’t work out how to apply it. Your example had gridlines running horizontally, whereas mine need to run vertically. You could plot yours on the Y axis using 0s as the X values.

In theory I could plot mine on the X axis using 0s as the Y values. The only trouble is my Y values are categories rather than numbers so I can’t figure out how to do it.

Do you know of another way I can show the gridlines?