Skipping distance on axis; special bars

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jamie Martin
  • Start date Start date
J

Jamie Martin

Two more charting questions:

1. Can Excel skip some distance on its value axis? I have eleven series
to plot, and one of them is ten times larger than all of the others. I
would like the vertical axis to show the numbers between 0 and 100,000
and the numbers between 900,000 and 1,000,000, skipping the numbers in
between (with some blank space to make the skip obvious).

2. I want to show the numbers of degrees in each of three majors awarded
in 1975 and in 1980, but I also want to show how many of each type of
degree went to men and how many went to women. So I want two groups of
three bars, each bar split into two parts (for men and women). I'm not
sure how to do this with Excel's regular bar or stacked bar chart types.
can anyone help?

Finally, if I can't do these things with Excel, what other charting
programs are there that I might use? I noticed there was a list of them
on the CD that comes with John Walkenbach's "Excel Charts," but I didn't
want to buy the book just for that list.

Thanks again. I love Usenet.

Jamie
 
Hi Jamie -

1. You can use a variation on Tushar's Broken Y Axis example
(http://tushar-mehta.com), or otherwise fudge your axis with a dummy
series, like the examples on my Axis Tricks page:

http://www.geocities.com/jonpeltier/Excel/Charts/axes.html

You can use various techniques to make it look like the bar is broken
too if you want, maybe with some kind of rectangle, with no border and a
fill color matching the plot area fill; tilt it at an angle so it
slashes diagonally on the excessively long column. While answering the
second part below, I noticed that Andy Pope has an example too:

http://andypope.info/charts/brokencolumn.htm

2. This is the elusive clustered-stacked column chart type. Excel
doesn't offer it among its portfolio of chart types, but that doesn't
mean you can't do it. Through careful arrangement of the data in your
worksheet, you can make a stacked column chart that looks like a
clustered-stacked column chart.

There is a tutorial showing this technique on Bernard Liengme's site:
http://www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme/ExcelTips/Columns.htm

which is based on the example on Stephen Bullen's web site:
http://www.bmsltd.co.uk/Excel/Default.htm
Go to Charting Examples, and download FunChart4.xls

The following MSKB article has an example:
XL2000: Creating Charts with Multiple Groups of Stacked Bars
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-ca;214119

- Jon
 
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