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Creating Advanced Charts

This document discusses how to create advanced charts in Excel that go beyond basic charts. It defines advanced charts as charts that allow comparison of multiple data sets on the same chart through customization of formatting and adding additional data series. The document then provides a step-by-step example of creating an advanced chart that plots monthly blog articles published against site visitors, demonstrating how to combine line and column charts, add a secondary axis, and modify axis titles.

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Aldrin Liwanag
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209 views3 pages

Creating Advanced Charts

This document discusses how to create advanced charts in Excel that go beyond basic charts. It defines advanced charts as charts that allow comparison of multiple data sets on the same chart through customization of formatting and adding additional data series. The document then provides a step-by-step example of creating an advanced chart that plots monthly blog articles published against site visitors, demonstrating how to combine line and column charts, add a secondary axis, and modify axis titles.

Uploaded by

Aldrin Liwanag
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Creating Advanced Charts - Excel Tutorial

Graphics, images, and charts are great ways to visualize and represent the data,
and Excel does exactly same thing for us by automatically creating the charts. There
may be times when we would like to go beyond the basic charts that excel creates
for us. This article will focus on that.

What is an advanced chart?


An advanced chart is a chart that goes beyond the basic charts created by Excel.
Let's say you have more than one set of data that you would like to compare on the
same chart, you can create your basic chart with one set of data then add more
datasets to it and apply other items i.e. formatting to the chart. This is what
advanced charts are all about.

The importance of advanced charts


 They provide consolidated information in a single chart that makes it easier to
compare more than one data set and make decisions quickly
 They allow us to customize the look and feel of the charts

Step by step example of creating advanced charts


In this tutorial exercise, we will assume that we run a blog and have software that
gives us the number of monthly visitors. We would like to see the relationship
between the numbers of articles published per month vs the total month traffic. We
will work with the following data set.

Month Articles Published Site Visitors

Jan 20 120

Feb 16 145

Mar 19 130
Apr 25 200

Jun 20 230

Jul 13 221

 Create a new workbook in Excel


 Enter the data shown above
 Create a basic column chart as shown below. If you do not know how to
create a basic chart, then read the article on charts.

It's now time to take our charts beyond the basics. Select the orange bars
representing traffic

 Click on change chart type as shown below

 You will get the following dialog window

1. Select Combo
2. Click on the clustered column
3. Select Line chart
4. Click on OK button

Congratulations, you just created a chart with two types of charts in it.

Let's now add a secondary axis to our chart to make it look more presentable.
 Select the chart
 Click on Design under chart tools and select change chart type

1. Click on Secondary Axis check box under Site Visitors


2. Click on OK button

Let's now edit the chart, primary and secondary axis titles as shown below.

1. Go to Add chart elements


2. Click on Axis titles
3. Select primary verticals
4. Double click on the chart title and edit the title

Write Monthly Published Articles vs Site Traffic. Your complete chart should now
look as follows

As you can see from the above complete chart, we have consolidated two data sets
and visualized them in such a way that it easily shows the effect of one data set onto
the other.

Download the above Excel Code

Summary
Advanced charts are a great way of consolidating more than one data set and
visualizing them to identity patterns, etc.

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