All Industries, General Excel Financial Models

Excel offers two types of column charts – clustered and stacked. In clustered charts series are put next to each other, and in stacked charts – on top of each other.

In many real-life situations, a combination of both types would come in handy. Such a chart would be useful if you have more than two dimensions of data to show on the chart. For instance, you may have sales data grouped by years, regions and product, and showing all this information on a chart would be useful. There can be other examples when you need to show your information with many levels of granularity: years, month, product groups and sub-groups, countries and areas, budgeted and actual figures. You will surely find more examples where showing such additional details would be useful.

Unfortunately, Excel does not offer such a built-in chart, so we need to find a way around to have it. In the attached file I have created a chart showing three-dimensional data. It is based on a standard Excel column type of charts with a few adjustments I have done on it. There is also a certain transformation of underlying data needed for the chart to work properly. This is done automatically by formulas. There is a detailed explanation included on how the chart is set up and how the formulas work.

The chart is compatible with all versions of Excel and does not use VBA macros.

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