I am trying to create a 100% stacked bar graph in excel, however the resulting graph is only showing information for every other x-value. The x-axis is 134 values so I am not sure if the size is the problem or if it something else.
The X axis labels of a category axis (like in a a column or bar chart) is dynamically adjusted to the available space. When there are many columns/bars, not every column/bar will have a label. You can test that by making the chart wider/higher, to see how the X axis labels appear and disappar.
Having over 130 categorical items on an X axis is not good data visualisation. It's a rather horrible experience for the poor reader. Excel's behaviour is actually useful here. By not displaying all labels, it makes such a chart fairly unusable, and you may be inspired to think of better ways to visualise the data.
Maybe several smaller charts for segments of the data would be an option.
Related
Please have a look at This Excel chart. Here is a screenshot:
Here is the data:
There is a scatter series of blue of dots (plus a trendline) and a green area series. The chart data are contained within the series.
The problem I have is that the x-axis values of the two series are not aligned. For example, the second and third blue dots at x = 3.1 and x = 3.8 are in the correct place along the x-axis, but in the green area series they appear to be above x = 2.0 and x = 3.3. How to fix this?
Change the Scatter to a Line Chart, then format Line Color so that there is "No Line". Add trendline.
There may be another way to do this while retaining the Scatterplot, I'm not sure, but this seems to be visually what you're looking for, but I think you will need to use a Line Chart for this unfortunately. The problem is summarized in this similar Q on SuperUser:
https://superuser.com/questions/964264/aligning-stacked-bar-chart-w-scatter-plot-data
The short answer is that your combining (unsuccessfully) a categorical series (the columns) with interval/ratio series (the line charts). So, Excel doesn't know how to plot your categories (columns) on an interval scale (the current X axis).
You can verify this by selecting Chart > Layout > Axes > Secondary Horizontal Axis > More Secondary Horizontal Axis Options. Without making any changes to the axes configuration, the second X-axis will now appear along the bottom of the chart, and you can see it is scaled differently from your Scatter data.
I.e., in the Scatter series, the data is X/Y pairs. But in your Area chart, it treats the X-values as categorical, and in this context "1.1" is no different than "Bob" -- it is a cardinal representation of the data rather than an ordinal representation.
The problem I have is that the x-axis values of the two series are not aligned.
So even though the two series appear to share the same set of X-Values, the Chart is simply incapable of treating those as the same type of data. The x-axes are not aligned because they are not the same data or even the same type of data!
All that said, if you change both series to XY Scatter, it is possible (with some extraordinary effort) to apply shading/coloring below a series or between two series, etc.
http://peltiertech.com/fill-under-between-series-in-excel-chart/
http://chandoo.org/wp/2013/02/13/shaded-line-charts-excel/
What you can do is plot the Area graph on a secondary axis. Then go to Chart -> Layout -> Axes -> Display Secondary Horizontal Axis to see the axis, right click for its properties and change the type of the Axis Type to "Date axis". This (kind of) changes the axis to a numerical type, as opposed to a category type.
However, the area graph will still be placed incorrectly too far to the right because Excel will continue to plot the series as a (kind of) category type, with its data points appearing in the centre of each category as opposed to at the correct x value like in an XY scatter plot.
To get the graphs overlaying the most correctly, you can create a Scaled-up x value series which is, say, 1,000 times the original x-values and use this for the x-values of the area plot. By scaling by 1,000 or 10,000, you eventually get the granularity to a point where it looks more like X-Y plot, but is actually an area plot, and the graphs look like they coincide perfectly.
I have a table (came from a pivot table) where I have formatted the column 4 cells to show 1 billion as 1. But when I select the table and insert a chart, I am getting my units in millions. So the 14.8 billion number for Mexico is showing up as 14,800 on the chart. Why might this be happening and how can I fix this? This is also making all my other bars negligibly small. Note that the first three columns are not in billions and are totally different things. Some are percentages, some are other small numbers.
Table:
Chart:
You need a secondary horizontal axis and some formatting on the Axes.
In Excel 2013
First change the Chart Type to Combo and select Clustered Bar for both sets of data, then Check
Secondary Axis for the Percentage Series.
Then set up the axis limits so they match, e.g.
Percentage: min -.5 max 2
Billions: min -5e9 max 20e9
Then set the percentage format on the source data to a custom Number format of "";(0)%;0%
Then set the Billions format as 0,,,;"";0
You will get something like this:
EDIT
Now that we have the general principles, we can apply them to your specific data.
I will also switch to Excel 2010 do show the different menus.
The data selection looks like this
Select the non-Billion series (plural!) and check the secondary axis
If the larger data is always positive then you can use custom formatting to clean up the axis
Align the primary and secondary axes so that the grid lines match on both
The end result is clean and readable.
Mixing percentages and numbers for the smaller numbers is not handled by this but I would suggest that that would be confusing anyway?
The simplest way to fix this might be to plot cells containing the billions values divided by 10^9 rather than to plot the billions themselves, though via a secondary axis may be possible.
Using Excel 2007. For the purple bars, the example on the left uses ColumnE values, on the right ColumnF values. E1 contains =F1/10^9 and F1 contains =14800000000:
It appears that there are 3 questions here: 1) "Why might this be happening", 2) "how can I fix this", and 3) something like "how can I plot data which lie on two widely differing ranges, and make them all reasonably visible anyway", even if there was no explicit question on this.
There are several ways to solve issue #2 about the units (e.g., billions) and numbers (e.g., 14.8 vs. 14,800.0) shown in the axis, each one with its own pros and cons:
Use Format Axis -> Axis Options -> Display units.
This might be the answer to your issue #1 as well, you might have the following selection: Display units -> Millions, and unchecked Show display units... Otherwise, I wouldn't know why you chart shows what it shows.
Use faked tick marks, as indicated in the (excellent) site of Jon Peltier
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ArbitraryAxis.html
It gives detailed instructions on how to create tick marks on an axis with arbitrary labels (which may be text, numbers, etc.), which is more generic than what the OP wants here. In this particular case, the labels will be the desired numbers.
Create new cells containing data that would be plotted exactly the way you want.
As for your issue #3, I guess the only option is to have a Secondary Axis (see the answer by pnuts).
Thus, to come up with the best final chart for you might use a combination of one of the options I gave here and a secondary axis.
I'm looking for a multiple axis line chart similar to the one in the image below, (which is a javascript chart made by amcharts).
Does excel have an option to draw charts line these? Note there are 3 Y axes, and 3 line charts allowing you to compare data.
Is it possible to get more than 3 data points, each with unique axis on one chart ?
It is possible to get both the primary and secondary axes on one side of the chart by designating the secondary axis for one of the series.
To get the primary axis on the right side with the secondary axis, you need to set to "High" the Axis Labels option in the Format Axis dialog box for the primary axis.
To get the secondary axis on the left side with the primary axis, you need to set to "Low" the Axis Labels option in the Format Axis dialog box for the secondary axis.
I know of no way to get a third set of axis labels on a single chart. You could fake in axis labels & ticks with text boxes and lines, but it would be hard to get everything aligned correctly.
The more feasible route is that suggested by zx8754: Create a second chart, turning off titles, left axes, etc. and lay it over the first chart. See my very crude mockup which hasn't been fine-tuned yet.
The picture you showd in the question is actually a chart made using JavaScript. It is actually very easy to plot multi-axis chart using JavaScript with the help of 3rd party libraries like HighChart.js or D3.js. Here I propose to use the Funfun Excel add-in which allows you to use JavaScript directly in Excel so you could plot chart like you've showed easily in Excel. Here I made an example using Funfun in Excel.
You could see in this chart you have one axis of Rainfall at the left side while two axis of Temperature and Sea-pressure level at the right side. This is also a combination of line chart and bar chart for different datasets. In this example, with the help of the Funfun add-in, I used HighChart.js to plot this chart.
Funfun also has an online editor in which you could test your JavaScript code with you data. You could check the detailed code of this example on the link below.
https://www.funfun.io/1/#/edit/5a43b416b848f771fbcdee2c
Edit: The content on the previous link has been changed so I posted a
new link here. The link below is the original link
https://www.funfun.io/1/#/edit/5a55dc978dfd67466879eb24
If you are satisfied with the result you achieved in the online editor, you could easily load the result into you Excel using the URL above. Of couse first you need to insert the Funfun add-in from Insert - My add-ins. Here are some screenshots showing how you could do this.
Disclosure: I'm a developer of Funfun
There is a way of displaying 3 Y axis see here.
Excel supports Secondary Axis, i.e. only 2 Y axis. Other way would be to chart the 3rd one separately, and overlay on top of the main chart.
An alternative is to normalize the data. Below are three sets of data with widely varying ranges. In the top chart you can see the variation in one series clearly, in another not so clearly, and the third not at all.
In the second range, I have adjusted the series names to include the data range, using this formula in cell C15 and copying it to D15:E15
=C2&" ("&MIN(C3:C9)&" to "&MAX(C3:C9)&")"
I have normalized the values in the data range using this formula in C15 and copying it to the entire range C16:E22
=100*(C3-MIN(C$3:C$9))/(MAX(C$3:C$9)-MIN(C$3:C$9))
In the second chart, you can see a pattern: all series have a low in January, rising to a high in March, and dropping to medium-low value in June or July.
You can modify the normalizing formula however you need:
=100*C3/MAX(C$3:C$9)
=C3/MAX(C$3:C$9)
=(C3-AVERAGE(C$3:C$9))/STDEV(C$3:C$9)
etc.
Taking the answer above as guidance;
I made an extra graph for "hours worked by month", then copy/special-pasted it as a 'linked picture' for use under my other graphs. in other words, I copy pasted my existing graphs over the linked picture made from my new graph with the new axis.. And because it is a linked picture it always updates.
Make it easy on yourself though, make sure you copy an existing graph to build your 'picture' graph - then delete the series or change the data source to what you need as an extra axis. That way you won't have to mess around resizing.
The results were not too bad considering what I wanted to achieve; basically a list of incident frequency bar graph, with a performance tread line, and then a solid 'backdrop' of hours worked.
Thanks to the guy above for the idea!
Best and Free ( maybe only) solution for this is google sheets.
i don't know whether it plots as u expected or not but certainly you can draw multiple axes.
Regards
keerthan
Im using Excel for Mac 2011 and I have the following figure
I would like to still show the bubbles outside of the available chart area, while keeping the maximum and minimum axes values unchanged.
Create an identical chart with the same data, but with axis limits that show the full bubbles. Then set all the formatting in the chart other than the bubbles to the equivalent of "none", i.e, no axis labels, chart outlines, gridlines, chart and plot borders, background color, etc.
With very careful sizing and positioning of this bubbles-only chart over the original chart, you can get the bubbles to extend beyond the plot area of the original. If the size or position of a bubble is a little off, modify the overlay chart's data by the tiny amount needed to get the bubble to cover the underlying original bubble. Turn off the formatting for the underlying bubbles as last step.
NOT programmatic, very trial and error, and fussy, of course, and I hope someone comes up with a more elegant way to achieve your goal. But I was able to get it to work on my Windows machine.
I'm using Excel 2007 to create a log-scale chart of numbers (specifically the Zimbabwean dollar exchange rate) over time. I'm using an x-y scatterplot and noticing one odd quirk.
The range of y values (numbers) spans a factor of about 10^30. On every chart I make using this data, half the gridlines are missing. Specifically, only the gridlines corresponding to the largest values show up. In fact, regardless of the total range only the top factor of 10^13 or so have gridlines. This is not dependent on the log base.
Am I doing something wrong? Is this a known bug? I can't find any references to this issue on google or microsoft's bug reports.
Silly work around as well, but if you are going to be presenting your graph in Powerpoint, you can make the background color of the graph "no fill" and then when you paste it into Powerpoint (I paste it as a PDF). You can draw grid lines and match them up with the ticks on the y-axis. Arrange your graph "bring to front" when you are finished drawing so that the lines won't appear in front of your data. You can group it all to make sure the lines don't shift while making your presentation and so that they re-size properly if you re-size your graph.
I'm having the same problem, it's definitely a bug.
Try a sequence 1, 10, 100, 1e+12, 1e+30 vs 0..4 and plot x,y scatter, and clearly the scale grid is messed-up even in linear, and in log is the behaviour you described.
My workaround was to make a transformation of the values and depict them scaled down (by a Million factor). That way the data the graph is handling is never above 10e9 (the value I started to hit issues).
So, my suggestion is: graph a Log version of the data (and clearly make a legend for it)
I was able to replicate your problem and come up with a pseudo-workaround.
The formatting goes a bit funny, but all the lines show up if you right-click on the axis, select Format Axis. Under the Axis Options, there is a Horizontal Axis Crosses setting. Changing it from Automatic to Maximum Axis Value causes all the gridlines to appear.
Ran into same thing: Will not show log grid lines for y-axis ranging below 1e-7. Have need for dynamic range of 1e5 down to 1e-15. Tagging auto or max will show grid, but puts axis labels in non-useful place for display.
My workaround: used Open Office to get what I needed. Could not find useful solution in Excel 2010.