It is not uncommon that to communicate a message you need to show two or three related data series. It is relatively easy to create a single graph that has all the data series shown. The challenge comes when you have values in the data series that are different by an order of magnitude or…
Category: Excel Charts
25 Advanced Excel Chart Tips and Tricks (video)
These 25 tips and tricks will help you take your skills in creating Excel charts/graphs to the next level. The techniques apply to all modern versions of Excel (Excel 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel 365 that is part of Office 365). These tips don’t require VBA, plug-ins, or add-ins so you can apply them right…
How one character in a file name can mess up linking Excel cells or graphs to a PowerPoint slide
I recently had someone contact me asking why the linking between Excel and PowerPoint was not working properly. They had followed my advice in this article & video but it wasn’t working properly. Let me explain the scenario, what I discovered the problem was, and the solution that shows how changing one character in the…
Lining up related column graphs at the horizontal axis
The challenge If you have related column graphs, how do you line them up so the horizontal axis in each graph is aligned? If you’ve ever tried to position the graphs manually in Excel or PowerPoint, you know that it is impossible to do it by trying to drag the graphs into the right position.…
Adding a watermark to an Excel or PowerPoint chart/graph
What can you do if you want to share a chart via email, Slack, or Teams but the chart doesn’t have all of the final data yet or you want others to know it contains confidential data? A good solution is to place a watermark behind the chart so everyone knows it is a draft…
Excel bar chart with conditional formatting based on MoM change %
Conditional formatting of Excel charts allows you to have the formatting of the chart update automatically based on the data values. A common approach is to use the values as the criteria as shown in the article and video on creating a conditional formatting column chart. In this article and video I want to show…
7 steps to make one line stand out in a spaghetti line graph
If you have a line graph with many lines and you want to focus the viewer on one of those lines, how can you do that? Here are 7 steps you can follow to make one line the focus in what is often called a spaghetti line graph (because the many lines can look like…
Lessons in creating effective Excel charts from the October 2019 SWD Challenge
Every month, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic of storytelling with data posts a new challenge to help professionals think about how they can visually communicate a message from data. The October 2019 challenge is drawn from her new book and looks at how to communicate the message from a table of data related to revenue and number…
Conditional formatting for Excel column charts
Conditional formatting is a very popular feature of Excel and is usually used to shade cells with different colors based on criteria that the user defines. We can apply the idea of conditional formatting to column charts by using multiple data series because the Excel feature applies only to cells, not charts. Define boundary values…
Stagger long axis labels and make one label stand out in an Excel column chart
The problem with long axis labels and the common solution If you have long axis labels in a column chart, Excel will rotate them to fit the full labels in if the chart is not wide enough. This is hard for the viewer to read. The common approach to solving this issue is to add…