Graphing Format (97)

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I’ve been asked by my boss to shade a portion of a graph for a report to my Board of Directors. For example say the y axis is from 0 to 50 I want to shade only the portion 20 to 30. Is this possible and if so how do you do it?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers

Eric

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You could use the drawing tools to create a rectangle of the appropriate colour and place over the intended area.

Cheers

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A “dirty” method I’ve had to resort to is:
make a range with points on two opposite borders of the region you want to shade.

Format is with one of the line styles at the bottom of the list – they are thick “shady” formats, and with an appropriate colour. Make the line weight (width) as thick as possible. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t use symbols to mark the points.

It takes a bit of trial and error to get the points close enough together that the lines overlap.

Its advantage is that it sizes and moves with the chart.

hope this helps a bit.
Ruth

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One way is to add series and apply another chart format to just those series.

In the attached example, I started with a side-by-side column chart. I added a ‘low’ and a ‘high’ series with constant values, and formatted them as Area (stacked, the second Area sub-type). To do this, you simply select the series on the chart, choose Chart | Chart Type… from the menu and select Area. You have to do this one at a time for each series.

Excel will combine all series that are formatted similary, such as stacked-area and side-by-side column. To achieve the appearance of a ‘floating’ range from 20 to 30, I formatted the ‘low’ series to have no area or border, so all that appears is the ‘high’ series (really the difference between your low and high ends of the portion you want shaded, stacked on top of the now invisible ‘low’).

Excel charts have a great deal of flexibility, but it can sometimes take a good deal of manual tweaking and some creativity to achieve the desired effect. You’ll notice I extended the range of the two Area series one row before and one row after the other charted data. I guess in Area charts, the X-axis has to stop and end on a category. Until I added those two rows, the column set of series were half cut off at each end of the chart. I also modified the legend by deleting the legend items for ‘low’ and ‘high’ (select the legend, pause a moment, then select the specific legend item, and hit Delete) and formatted the border of the visible Area series to match that of the chart gridlines.

Anywho, hope this helps, and happy charting!

Aloha,

John Jacobson

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