Line charts are essential for trend analysis, comparison over time, spotting distribution or volatility in your data. In this page, let me introduce 6 powerful line chart variations to help you with business data analysis. These are,
- Indexed Line Chart
- Sparklines
- Spaghetti Line Chart
- Smoothed Line Chart
- Forecast Line Chart
- Line Chart Combinations
Line Chart Variations - Video
In the below video, I explain 6 line chart variations with instructions on how to create and work with them. Watch it or read on for the chart details.
Indexed Line Chart
Indexed charts are great for comparing apples with oranges. For example, you can compare sales of two products over a period of time with Indexed Chart, even if the sales numbers are in different ballparks (one sells in millions, other in thousands).
Here is a demo of indexed line chart.
Sparklines
Sparklines are tiny charts that you can fit in a cell. They pack a lot of information and help in visualizing more items.
Here is a sparkline demo:
Spaghetti Line Chart
Often we have too many lines and that can be distracting. Use a spaghetti line chart to drive focus to one of the lines. You can make them interactive so users can pick the noodle they want to taste.
Here is a demo of interactive spaghetti chart.
Smoothed Line Chart
Sometimes our data is too volatile. In such cases, you can smooth it to spot the trend and meaningful changes.
There are various ways to smooth line charts. You can use “Smooth line” option of the chart or apply moving average based smoothing.
Here is a demo of both techniques.
Learn more:
Forecast Line Chart
Use Excel’s FORECAST.ETS() and other suite of functions to create forecasts from your data and visualize them. You can analyze trend and seasonality of the data with these functions. Forecast charts are helpful in business reporting.
Here is a demo of a forecast line chart.
Learn more:
Line Chart Combinations
No matter how hard you try, sometime a line alone won’t do. In those cases, you can easily combine line charts with other visualizations in Excel. Combination Charts are very easy to create.
Here is a demo of line chart with column combination.
How to create combination charts?
- In new versions of Excel (365, 2016+), just go to Insert ribbon and click on Combo chart button (the one that looks like a line column combination).
- In earlier versions of Excel, just make a line chart, right click on the line that you want to change to something else and select “Change series chart type” option.
Don't forget the labels ...
You can make regular or any of the variations listed above better by adding sensible labels and chart titles that tell a story.
Here is a demo of special labels on line charts.
Download Line Chart Variations Workbook
Click here to download the Excel file with all these variations. Play with the data or charts to learn more about these 6 line charts.
If you have any questions or suggestions, post them in the comments section.
21 Responses to “Distinct count in Excel pivot tables”
The distinct count option works well but I have found that if I have a date field and want to group by year, month, etc. that option seems to be disabled. I need to do both, distinct count and group by year/month.
Example data; sales orders with item quantities with dates.
Challenge; sum the item quantities, count the distinct orders and group by month. How do I do this?
Perhaps that's not possible due to the grouping?
@Al... When you use data model based pivots, you cannot group values manually anymore. Why not use Excel 2016's default date grouping option? In this case we have just a few dates, so Excel is not grouping them, but if you have an year's worth of data, when you make the pivot with date in the row label area, Excel automatically groups them. If you have fewer dates or want to use your own grouping, just create a table with all dates, add columns with month, week, year etc. Then connect this table (these types of tables are usually called as calendar tables) to your data on date field as a relationship. Now you can create reports by month, quarter etc easily.
Is this the only way to do it in 2013? I find it rather cumbersome to have to create another data table listing dates with the another column for MONTH() and YEAR() to be able to summarise data for senior level...
I know people find adding calendar tables cumbersome, but it is a best practice and let's you add more layers of analysis quite easily. For example, adding analysis by weekday vs. weekend or by financial quarter or YTD calculations (you would need either Power Pivot DAX or some very carefully setup pivot table value field settings)
I had absolutely no idea this was possible. Very useful, nice work!
Doesn't work for 2010 version though (or at least not my works version)
Hi ,
The post has the following in it :
These instructions work only in Excel 2016, Office 365 and Excel 2013.
when i have 2 different Pivot tables, one without the enabled “Add this data to data model” option, and the other one with it enabled.. is there anyway i can link slicers between them?
if the answer is NO,, what to do ?
Quick note, the “Add this data to data model” option is not available for the Mac version.
perhaps outside scope of this article but I have found when I attempt to create a pivot table from an external data source (connection to a sql view) the "Add this data to data model" becomes greyed out. Anybody experienced and found a solution so I can start getting distinct count in my pivot tables?
Is there a way to still add a calculated field when using distinct count?
I found I can't change the date source after tick the " add this data to the data model", can you help to adv how to change the date source in such case?
Is there a way to update the source once you have added to the data model? I receive a new spreadsheet weekly and would like to update the connection so my tables pull from the new source.
Hi Crhis, I like how you have hulk (superhero) as your avatar. Do you know that there is a superhero in Excel too? It's Power Query. You can use it to solve your problem in a simple click. Here an intro if you need some guidance.
Powerful Introduction to Power Query
A big Thank you. It worked.
Hi, have survey data that I need to analyze but the challenge is that my key fields are showing horizontally. I tried to transpose the fields using Power Query, but unfortunately the new fields are returning same values on a pivot table despite using distinct values
How I can a do a pivot table with discount conts in some columns and then generate shor report filter pages. pls it drives crazy
Hi. Why grand total pivot of distinct count is 13? shouldn't it be 67?
Great Answer! Saved me lots of time!
Thank you!!!
Worked awesome! Thanks!!
Hi Chandoo,
I am using pivot tables for distinct count and now I need to update them with new set of data. But when I update the source data, all the columns and formatting of Pivot table disappears and I need to build it from Scratch.
Is there a possibility that I can update the source data with new rows added and also retain my pivot tables?