How to create a Step Chart in Excel (that is fully dynamic & easy to read)

1 year ago
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Jan 11, 2018 Excel Charts
Step by Step approach to creating a Step Chart in Excel from Scratch. You can also download the template from the link below.

What is a Step Chart? A Step Chart is great for visualizing variables that change on an irregular basis. For example price and inventory changes. If you create a line chart directly on the data set you will realize it doesn't show the correct visualization. For the correct visualization you need a data preparation table that plots two points for each value. One point represents the value before the change and the second point the value after the change.

Once you get past this step, you can further improve the readability of the Excel Step Chart by taking additional steps to bring the data labels inside the chart instead of relying on the axis. This improves the readability of the chart.

The last part of the video shows you how to create a fully dynamic Step Chart so that when new dates are added, the chart updates automatically. We do this with Excel's OFFSET function and Name Manager to create dynamic chart ranges.

★★ Contributions ★★

Thanks to Bart Titulaer (Lecturer at Fontys International Business School in Venlo, Netherlands) for providing the Step Chart Template.

🡻 Download the workbook here:
http://www.xelplus.com/how-to-create-step-chart-in-excel/

Other fun chart tricks:

Info Charts (non standard graphs): https://youtu.be/C9beIaL-cBA
Dynamic drop-down: https://youtu.be/22jcw5slQJk
Changing chart ranges: https://youtu.be/sHfWRb2yUrM

★ My Online Excel Courses ► https://courses.xelplus.com/

✉ Subscribe & get my TOP 10 Excel formulas e-book for free
https://www.xelplus.com/free-ebook/

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