From the course: Microsoft Office Specialist: Excel Expert (Microsoft 365 Apps) Cert Prep

Create and modify dual-axis and combo charts - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Microsoft Office Specialist: Excel Expert (Microsoft 365 Apps) Cert Prep

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Create and modify dual-axis and combo charts

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- [Instructor] Our workbooks and worksheets hold all kinds of data. And when it comes time to create a chart, there may be times when you want to show two different data sets, such as how many of an item you've sold versus what your total profit was. So in this video we're going to take a look at how to create a dual axis chart and how to create a combo chart. Let's go ahead and jump into our workbook. We're working in the 05_01 DualAxisCharts workbook, and we will first create a chart with item, sales, and unit sold for our 2022 sales. I'll select the range, go to insert. Here are all of the charts. We'll just do a simple 2D column chart. We see our items on the horizontal axis, and our sales on the left-hand side. Let's go to change chart type, and go down to combo. So for units sold, I can go ahead and add a line chart to really make it stand out as a secondary axis. And now look over on the right-hand side, I have a new axis. So we're seeing the total sales, the items, and the units sold. Much easier to understand, isn't it? So that's how you can start with a simple column chart and change it to a combo chart. On this tab, we're going to start right off with a combo chart. Select the range, go to insert, I'll click my more button to get into the recommended charts, all charts, and select combo. Right now, the year and the unit sold are being shown as clustered column. The price is a line chart as is the income. We can make the income a secondary axis. We can make both of the line charts visible to us, but we really only want to have one secondary axis. Price really doesn't make sense to me, but the income sure does. Let's go ahead and click OK and see how that is represented. So we have our unit sold, the year, and we have our income over on the right-hand side. If you want to add titles to your axis, which really makes sense, we'll come over to add chart element, axis titles. Now we have our primary horizontal, which would be our items and year. And notice that I'm typing up in the formula bar. Soon as I hit enter, it populates that text box for me. On the left-hand side, the primary vertical, these are the units sold. And on the right-hand side, this is our income. So it really makes sense if you're going to add secondary axis to go ahead and add the titles on there. I do see that our years are not showing correctly so let me show you how to fix that. On our chart design tab, we'll go to select data. And if we look at the horizontal axis labels, you'll see why they're showing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Let's click on edit. And for the range, we'll come down into our worksheet and select the years. Click OK and OK again. And now you can see that they are showing correctly. So that's how you can create and format and work with your dual axis charts and your combo charts.

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