Excel is great at creating charts. With some types of data, you may have a need for two-level axis labels for your chart. For instance, you may want something similar to the following along the X-axis for your chart:
Pro | Team | Reg | Pro | Team | Reg ... Eastern US | Western US ...
Setting up such an arrangement in an Excel worksheet is easy, but getting the same result in a chart may not be as obvious.
Go ahead and set up your worksheet to reflect the column titles the way you want them. These column titles will end up as your X-axis labels. You could set them up as follows:
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | 1 | | Eastern US | Western US | 2 | | Pro | Team | Reg | Pro | Team | Reg |
With your table completed, you are ready to create the chart. Just select your data table, including all the headings in the first two rows, then create your table. Excel automatically recognizes that you have two rows being used for the X-axis labels, and formats the chart correctly. Since the X-axis labels appear beneath the chart data, the order of the label rows is reversed—exactly as mentioned at the first of this tip. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. Two-level axis labels are created automatically by Excel.
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2020-01-08 12:10:03
Michael Merkel
Do you know of a way to get a Major Vertical Grid Line between Eastern US and Western US? I have a table that has years and months and I would like the major grid lines between the years but not the months. Excel 365
2017-04-11 12:13:33
Ashley
Can you do multiple level categories on both axes at once?
2016-06-01 14:11:01
gerald
I am using this to put the time and date on a graph, with the time on one line and the date on another.
It works fine except that I can't set the interval between the displayed times. Thus instead of nice-looking 6 hour intervals, excel has been choosing 6 hours and 50 minutes.
Is there a way to fix this?
2016-04-27 09:34:19
Drew Peregrim
Do you have any tips for three layers? I essentially am using excel to create a Gant chart using Excel's horizontal bar chart. Everything worked fine until I got to the third layer of labels. Excel rotated the 2nd layer text and it became unreadable. Have not found a way to get it to rotate that layer back to horizontal. All controls seem to work only on the last layer.
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