I have three columns of data. The data in column A is manager's names, column B is areas of business, column C is the data. There are roughly ten managers and three areas of business. The managers can have one to all three areas of business. A partial mock-up of the table is as follows:

Joe IT 19872
Joe Sales 98700
Joe Admin 32498
Bill IT 323
Bill Admin 3242
Sam IT 3241
Pat Sales 23413
Pat Admin 43214

I want a bar chart that will use columns A and B as the category (Y) axis and column C as the value (X) axis.

I can create the chart correctly except for one thing, it always puts the manager's names perpendicular to the business names. So the managers are vertical and the businesses are horizontal. The result is that the manager's names form one long vertical clump whereas the business names are easy to read.

How can I get both to be horizontal or to do something that will make it readable? I've tried everything that I can think of including making the font smaller and changing the alignment but that doesn't help. Nothing seems to affect the column A labels.

Thank you.

Hi,

You can not change the alignment of the labels.
What you can do is reduce the occurences of the managers name. You will
probably have to create a set of charting data which is separate from
the original data. Anyway just have the managers name occur against his
first item rather than ever item. It will not change the alignment
direction in the chart but it should be easier to read as the managers
name will be centered. You can change the alignment to left/right or center.

If you really must have horizontal text then you will need to build the
axis labels yourself. This can be done in 2 ways.

1. add a dummy series and move it to the secondary axis. Set the
secondary axis category labels to point to the manages only. Again a
reduced list of managers names will appear better. Set the secondary
axis labels to Low. They will currently be obscured by the primary axis
labels so to make them appear you will need to move the left side axis
to the right. To do this set the minimum x axis scale to -20000, which
is the major tick mark distance for you data. You will need to play with
the plot area and axis lines if you don't like the outer box this produces.

2. The other way is to add a dummy series plotted as xy scatter and use
the data label to hold the managers name. You will still need to offset
the axis in order for the points to appear within the plotarea so their
data labels can be displayed.

Cheers
Andy

blaforge wrote:
I have three columns of data. The data in column A is manager's names,
column B is areas of business, column C is the data. There are roughly
ten managers and three areas of business. The managers can have one to
all three areas of business. A partial mock-up of the table is as
follows:

Joe IT 19872
Joe Sales 98700
Joe Admin 32498
Bill IT 323
Bill Admin 3242
Sam IT 3241
Pat Sales 23413
Pat Admin 43214

I want a bar chart that will use columns A and B as the category (Y)
axis and column C as the value (X) axis.

I can create the chart correctly except for one thing, it always puts
the manager's names perpendicular to the business names. So the
managers are vertical and the businesses are horizontal. The result is
that the manager's names form one long vertical clump whereas the
business names are easy to read.

How can I get both to be horizontal or to do something that will make
it readable? I've tried everything that I can think of including making
the font smaller and changing the alignment but that doesn't help.
Nothing seems to affect the column A labels.

Thank you.



--

Andy Pope, Microsoft MVP - Excel
http://www.andypope.info