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Dec 11 2012

How To Make A Two-Sided Bar Chart [VIDEO]

double-sided bar charts in animal form
Don’t worry – your data won’t look quite this freaky.

As I promised in my last video, in this video I take the bar chart and transform it into a sexy, double-sided bar charta la …

create this sexy bar chart in Excel

#ooolalaaa

I first tried one of these with Tori Cushing, when we were charting out tweets vs. Facebook likes for a client, and it was love at first sight.

It’s a great option when you have two values with long labels you want to chart out. Or if you just want to show off. 🙂

Although I captured the video while working on a Mac (because the video quality on the work PC I brought home was crapola), I provide instructions for each step for both Mac and PC. It’s seven minutes.

Final Cleanup Tip

I didn’t include this in the video because Excel for Mac makes this so ridiculously difficult. But if you have any hints of OCD, it might bug you that the legend has PA on the left, while it’s to the right on the chart. If you didn’t notice that, you’re probably hating me for pointing it out. And I’m good with that. 🙂

Fixing The Legend on a PC

To fix it on a PC is easy peezy. Just right-click on the legend, choose Select Data, select DA under Legend Entries (Series), and click the down-facing arrow. You’ll see the legend update immediately.

legend fix for PC

Annnd On A Mac (Lame Alert)

To fix it on a Mac, follow the steps in this two-minute video. (It may help decrypt the scary Data Source menu anyway.)

 

Download The Excel File

You can download the Excel doc I worked from, if you want to poke at it a bit and take a peek under the hood.

Learn More

For more beastly data visualization tips and tricks, check out out my Annielytics Dashboard Course offerings.

Photo by mtsofan.

Written by Annie · Categorized: Excel · Tagged: Data Visualization, Excel Charts

Comments

  1. RubenRemy says

    December 30, 2012 at 6:45 AM

    Thanks for the video. I always wondered how to present the PA and DA in Excel as double-sided bar chart just as in Seomoz 🙂

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 30, 2012 at 5:01 PM

      Oh do they? I didn’t even know that. Serendipity at its finest. 🙂

      Reply
  2. Dadabla says

    March 31, 2014 at 9:39 AM

    Hi Annie, thanks for your wonderful blog.

    With the new excel 2013, it is not enough to change format of cells, you also need to format axis, exactly the same way: axis options > number > category > custom.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 10:14 AM

      Yeah, I just ran into that last week. I wonder if it’s a bug.

      Reply
  3. Greg Glynn says

    June 28, 2015 at 10:09 PM

    Just what I needed to know. Thanks for the tutorial.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      July 17, 2015 at 11:59 AM

      My pleasure!

      Reply
  4. Matt says

    August 25, 2015 at 4:31 PM

    I don’t suppose there is a way to implement a different scale for negative values than what is in place for positive values, is there? My data on one side has a different range of values than on the other. Converting to a percentage won’t convey the right information here.

    Great tutorial either way!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      August 26, 2015 at 4:29 PM

      I’ve never tried it, but I imagine it would work. I’m picturing a combination chart a la http://searchengineland.com/dashboard-series-creating-combination-charts-in-excel-163529 with negative values applied to the smaller of the two values. YMMV

      Reply
  5. Shuaib Hasan says

    April 12, 2018 at 5:42 AM

    Thanks for such a useful information.

    Reply

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