How to remove irrelevant months from the X axis in a bar chart?

[sonic99]

Hi all

I'm an absolute excel newbie, so please forgive me for my lack of knowledge...

I have values for 2018 (Jan, Feb and March) and 2019 (Jan, Feb and March). I've created a bar chart but it is displaying Months between March 2018 and 2019 which I don't want. What I'd ideally like is to have Jan 2018 and Jan 2019 side by side, and then the same for Feb and March... so I can easily see a trend. How would I go about creating a visualisation to represent these trends?

Many thanks in advance

S

 

[sonic99]

Anyone?

 

[Dave Paradi]

I think what would help is to put the 2018 and 2019 data into two different data series. That way the columns for each month can be beside each other like this.

A good tutorial for the basics of Excel charting is by Excel MVP Leila Gharani at https://www.xelplus.com/charts-basics/

 

[sonic99]

Thank you so much, Dave.

Are you able to recommend a tutorial that will help me recognise when and how to remodel my data? Eg. My data is in tabular format with each row belonging to a record, and the date column is in dd-mm-yyyy format. Or would I be able to achieve this by using a pivot table?

PS. I have thousands of records/rows.

 

[Dave Paradi]

Unfortunately I am not an expert at data remodeling. If you want to explore pivot tables, which may be an option for what you are describing, Excel has a good basics tutorial available when you first open Excel. Instead of selecting a file, choose the tutorial on Pivot Tables and it will walk through what they are and you should be able to determine whether that will achieve what you want.

 

[sonic99]

Unfortunately I am not an expert at data remodeling. If you want to explore pivot tables, which may be an option for what you are describing, Excel has a good basics tutorial available when you first open Excel. Instead of selecting a file, choose the tutorial on Pivot Tables and it will walk through what they are and you should be able to determine whether that will achieve what you want.

Thank you so much

 

[sonic99]

Sorry to bother you again. I'm just wondering if you're able to help me as to how to add an extra layer to this.

What I'd like to do is break down the sale quantities by product. How should I structure my data in order to achieve this?

At the moment, my data is structured in such a way so that there is a row for each transaction. Each product has multiple transactions. There is just one date column.

I think what would help is to put the 2018 and 2019 data into two different data series. That way the columns for each month can be beside each other like this.

A good tutorial for the basics of Excel charting is by Excel MVP Leila Gharani at https://www.xelplus.com/charts-basics/