Advanced Excel Charts & Graphs [With Template]

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 tutorial will focus on that complexity.

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 for complex charts in Excel
They allow us to customize the look and feel of the professional Excel charts

Step by step example of creating advanced charts

In this Excel Charts 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.

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Month

Articles Published

Site Visitors

Jan

120

Feb

145

Mar

130

Apr

200

Jun

230

Jul

221

Step 1) 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.

Step 2) Now, it's time for our charts and complex graphs in Excel to take beyond the basics. Select the orange bars representing traffic

Step 3) Click on change chart type as shown below

You will get the following dialog window

Step 4) Select Combo and,

Click on the clustered column
Select Line chart
Click on OK button

Congratulations, you just created a creative Excel 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

Click on Secondary Axis check box under Site Visitors
Click on OK button

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

Go to Add chart elements
Click on Axis titles
Select primary verticals
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 using Excel graphs.

Advanced Excel Charts and Graphs Template