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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T07:04:26+00:00

I seldom if ever use excel and have no deep understanding of graphs and

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I seldom if ever use excel and have no deep understanding of graphs and graphing-related functions. Having said that…

I have dozens of rows of data, composed by 4 columns

  • column 1 = amount/price (in numbers)
  • column 2 = description (the what
    in text)
  • column 3 = category (in text)
  • column 4 = subcategory (in
    text)

I want to make a bar graph of my rows of data so that, the end result looks like this:

X axis – categories
Y axis – amount/price

The trick here is for categories NOT to repeat themselves. For example, if our data is something like…

  • 100 | boat purchase | boats | 3 engine boat
  • 200 | boat purchase |
    boats | 2 engine boat
  • 500 | plane purchase | planes | 4 engine plane
  • 900 | car purchase | cars | 1 engine car

Then there should only be ONE instance of boats, planes and cars in my graph, under which all associated data would be summed up.

Last but not least, I have seen graphs where, these unique-not-repeated categories, instead of just being one single ‘bar’ so to speak, are composed of smaller bars. In this case, I want these smaller bars to be the sub categories, so that the end result would look like this:

basic and complex graph samples

In that sample image, I first present a ‘basic, classic’ graph where blue, yellow and red each represent a unique, different category. Right below it is what I want, a ‘breakdown’ of each category by subcategory where blue/yellow/red each represent an imaginary 3 different subcategories per category.

This means subcategories will repeat themselves for each category, but categories themselves will not.

For clarification, I currently only have 3 main categories and 6 or so sub-categories, but this could change in the future, hence the desire to have this in an automatic/dynamic fashion

Kind regards
G.Campos

EDIT: new image:

better explanation of desired graph result

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here i my take on it. Unfortunately I can’t post the screenshots as I don’t have enough posts.

    One solution is to use pivot charts put Amount in “Values”, Category in “Row Lables”, and SubCategory in “Column Labels”.

    I uploaded relevant images on a free image upload service.

    This is our source data:

    Amount  Decription  Category    SubCategory
100     boat purchase   boats   3 engine boat
200     boat purchase   boats   2 engine boat
500     plane purchase  planes  4 engine plane
900     car purchase    cars    1 engine car
450     boat purchase   boats   2 engine boat
110     plane purchase  planes  4 engine plane
550     car purchase    cars    1 engine car
230     car purchase    cars    2 engine car
450     car purchase    cars    5 engine car

    This is the desired graph (Edit: This has ghost bars):

    http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/849/pivot.gif/

    I just read the comment about no ghost graphs. This might be what you are looking for:

    http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/266/pivotnoghost.gif/

    Just googled and found something very similar here:

    peltiertech.com/WordPress/using-pivot-table-data-for-a-chart-with-a-dual-category-axis/

    You need to add http:// ( I can’t have more than two hyperlinks due to low number of posts)

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