Chart with high and low values
When one value on your chart is much higher than the rest, lower values on your chart might become unreadable. In this tutorial, you will learn a net way to deal with this kind of situations.
Here is how Excel will chart a data set with one value that is much higher than the rest of the values:
As you see, smaller values are almost indistinguishable due to chart scaling to show all values together.
We want to show all values together in the same chart too, but we also want them to be clearly understandable. Therefore, we have to crop this towering value to make it scalable.
To achieve our goal, we need to make a couple of little adjustments to our data set:
- Add 3 columns next to our original data. First column values will be the same for each series except the one with the high value. Give it a value just a little higher than the second higher value.
- Second and third columns will have “=NA()” as values for all series except the one with the high value. For second column, give it a value that will create a gap. And for third column, give it a little bigger value but not bigger than the first column value.
- Insert a stacked column chart by selecting whole data, than uncheck “Production” series from your source list.
4. Your chart is supposed to look like the one in the picture below.
5. Now we are going to format this chart to mate it look like the one below:
Here are the formatting I made on my chart:
- Add a chart title.
- Change color of the third column value on the chart to match the color of other series.
- Change fill of the second column value on the chart as pattern fill. Select vertical lines as pattern.
- Add labels for the first column values and move them above the bars.
- Add a label to the top of he longest series as a test box and write the original high value in it.
This is an easy way to create a chart with high and low values which shows all values together without compromising readability.
You can download the excel file for this tutorial and play with the chart yourself to get a better understanding of it.
