Tracey -

You can put the data for budget and actual side by side:

Budget Actual
Item 1 [data] [data]
Item 2 [data] [data]
Item 3 [data] [data]
etc.

Select the range and make a clustered column chart, which shows
budget-actual pairs of columns. If you want to show some overlap, double
click one set of columns (either), and on the Options tab, adjust the
Overlap parameter appropriately. I'd suggest not using 100%, because if
they go over 100% of budget, you won't see the budget column at all.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______


Tracey wrote:

Hello

I don't know much about charting, but have a user who wants to do something
like this:

They have a chart which shows the actual expenditure on a number of items,
this is normal column chart. Having already created this chart, they now
want to include another set of values which show the budget for these items
and represent this in the chart.

What they are hoping to have is the original column chart with the budget
shown as columns "in the background" so that readers can compare what they
have spent with what they were allowed to spend.

Please can you advise as to the best way to achieve this? I looked at combo
charts but as I say, I am new to this. If it helps, the list of items
reaches around 10. We are using Excel 2003.

cheers
Tracey