SubscribeSwitch Rows and Columns in Charts [Quick Charting Tip]
Let us say you have built a nice chart showing your sales and profits for the top 5 products (learn how to highlight top 5 products in a list), with products on X axis. Suddenly your boss wants to switch the rows to columns (or transpose the chart) so that she can see metric level grouping instead of product level grouping. No need to freak out and rush to Espresso machine, You can do it very easily with Excel Charting features.
In today’s quick tip you will learn how to swap chart rows and columns in excel,
In Excel 2007+, select the chart and go to “Design” tab. Here you will see a big-fat-”Switch rows and columns” button. Just click it and thump your chest. See this tutorial to understand.
In Excel 2003, select the chart and in the chart toolbar, you see 2 little buttons, called as “by row” and “by column”. Click the one you want and off you go. See this tutorial to get it.
Read more quick tips and/or charting tips, be awesome at work.
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At Chandoo.org, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". This blog is started in 2007 and today has 350+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts. 
Love your blog — thanks for sharing so much Excel wisdom. it’s been really helpful for me.
Do you know if there an equivalently easy way to switch the columns and rows of *data* itself (that is, the info in the celles), not just the charts? If you could point me in the right direction on how to do that, you’d have my eternal gratitude.
@Susan.. Thanks for the compliments. you can transpose the data using paste special.
Select the table you want to transpose, press CTRL+C, go to paste special and select transpose option. You can also use the keyboard shortcut – ALT+ESE
@Chandoo: You’ve just saved my sanity. Thank you!
Chandoo, Nice writeup. I have been working with dynamic ranges for populating dynamic charts which works nicely for column charts (as no. of columns are fixed I can declare that many named ranges and assign them to series). But when it comes to row charts (each row is a series now), I am not able to find a way to define dynamic chart ranges. Is it possible to apply some sort of formula to make this “switch rows to columns” ? It would be great if it is achievable through formulas alone without any Macros and please share any info if you are aware of. (I referred here – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA011098011033.aspx for dynamic column charts).
TIA.