Gosh! I know Mynda explained this, but I cannot locate the example: I have a bar chart of crime by city and year. I want to display the years 2018, 2019, 2020, etc. as a different color to differentiate by year as the crime type is the same.
How do I set up the spreadsheet so it automatically does this instead of doing it manually? Any help would be great!
Hi Lesley,
Welcome to our forum!
Each year must be a separate series and you then set the series to 100% overlap. To achieve this, put each year's data in a separate column with the year and months in the rows. Hope that points you in the right direction. If you get stuck, please share a sample Excel file so we can help you with an example.
Mynda
Thank you Mynda! I found the instructions under Trending Tricks from your Dashboard Course. It is exactly how you described it above:
By laying our data out in a particular format we can present our data for each time period in a different colour.
You can see that we have a column for each year and January of the second and third year has the same data. This gives us a continuation of our chart without any gaps.
We can use the formatting to give the illusion of one set of data in each month, when actually there are 3 - one for each year. It's just that 2 of the years have no data in them.
To fix the formatting click on any of the series and right click > Format Data Series > In the Series Options change the Series Overlap to 100%.
You can also make the columns wider by reducing the gap width.
