Here is a simple way to enhance your Excel charts – use shapes & pictures in your charts.
We will learn how to create something like this:

Looks interesting? Read on…
How to add drawing shapes / pictures to your charts
Watch this quick video tutorial to understand the process for adding shapes / pictures to your charts. We start by creating a simple chart filled with custom shape. Once the basic technique is clear, we then build an interactive chart that moves an arrow symbol based on user input. Pretty sweet.
Download shapes in your charts – Example workbook
Please download the example workbook and use it to understand this chart better.
More ways to use shapes in your charts
Check out few more fun & informative ways you can use shapes in your charts
- Understanding the effect of Grammy award on album sales – Grammy Bump Chart in Excel
- Create a column chart with background image
- Use shapes to make pretty charts
- Shapes in a dashboard – Celebrating India’s cricket worldcup victory
Share your shapes in chart idea & you could win Amazon gift card
This post is part of Awesome August Excel festival @ Chandoo.org.
To celebrate Awesome August, I am giving away $31 worth Amazon gift card to one lucky winner per post. You can participate in this contest by,
- Create a chart with shapes / pictures following the principles explained in the video
- Take a screenshot of your chart
- Upload the image to a free image hosting site like imgur or tinypic
- Post the link along with why you made the chart in comments section of this post
- One lucky participant gets $31 Amazon Gift card at the end of August.















8 Responses to “Create a Combination Chart, Add Secondary Axis in Excel [15 Second Tutorial]”
[...] Select the “daily completed” column and add it to the burn down chart. Once added, change the chart type for this series to bar chart (read how you can combine 2 different chart types in one) [...]
[...] set the height series to be plotted on secondary axis. Learn more about combining 2 chart types and adding secondary axis in [...]
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[...] To show the years, I have used another dummy series and plotted it on secondary axis (related: how to add secondary axis?) [...]
Thanks for this one!
[...] Choisissez la colonne « Daily Completed » et ajoutez-la au graphique. Une fois ajoutée, changez le type de graphique pour cette série à histogramme (lisez comment combiner 2 types de graphiques en un : combine 2 different chart types in one) [...]
How do i create a chart that has negative numbers on axis x and y and plot them correctly? I cannot seem to understand how to do this, please help.
Thanks.
Nat
You can also plot 2 or more Y axes in Excel using EZplot or Multy_Y from Office Expander.com
There is a demo version to try.
Cheers.