How to Make a Stacked Column Chart in Google Sheets
In this article, you will learn how to create a line chart in Google Sheets. A line chart is helpful when you want to show continuous data over time, such as monthly revenue growth rate.
How to create a Stacked Column Chart in Googe Sheets
- Select a data set you want to visualize.
- Go to the “Insert” tab and click ”Chart”, or navigate to the “Insert chart” icon in the toolbar.
- Then, you have a default chart on a sheet, and a chart editor shows up on the right.
- In the “Setup” tab of the editor, select “Stacked column chart” in the “Chart” type section.
- Double-check the data range selected and adjust it if needed.
- Also, ensure the correct ranges are input in X-axis and Series sections.
- Move to the “Customize” tab in the chart editor and customize your chart if you want.
Learn how to customize the design of the chart. Assume you want to create the graph in the picture below by changing its detailed design and formatting. You need to go through the steps under the screenshot.
- In the “Chart style” section, go to “Font” and select “Arial”.
- Navigate to “Chart & axis titles”. Choose “Chart title” in the drop-down list at the top and enter a chart title in the text box. Click the “Bold” icon in “Title format” and select blue in “Title text color”. Ensure the font is “Arial”.
- In the “Series” tab, choose ”Division D“ at a pull-down menu (not “Apply to all series”), change “Line color” to red and its occupancy to “100%”, and select “4px” for “Line thickness”.
- Stay in the “Series” section. Change the choice at the top tab to “Apply to all series”, navigate to the bottom of the section, check the box next to “Data labels” to a data label for each category, and the one next to “Total data label” to show total amounts of the bars. Double-check labels’ font is “Arial”.
- Navigate to the “Legend” section. Add a legend by selecting “Bottom” in “Position” and make it bold.
- Determine the y-axis by inputting minimum and maximum values for the range in text boxes.
As you can find many options and choices in each section (e.g., the “Vertical axis” section shown right above), there are many ways to customize your graph. Check and try other details we haven’t touched upon in this example to better understand and optimize your chart for your output purpose.
How can you change the order of legend and data?
As a default setting, the order of segments in a column chart is reversed to the order of the items in the data source. You can change the order of categories in the chart by following the steps below. We recommend that you do this before changing the detailed designs of your chart.
- Go to the “Set up” tab in the chart editor.
- Move on to the “Series” section and change the order of the series as you want. For example, suppose you're going to make “Division A” the top category in a bar (or the leftmost segment in the legend), followed by Division B, C, and D from the top or the left. In that case, you can reverse the order of series names - the order should be “Division D”, “Division C”, “Division B”, and “Division A” from the top.
- The legend and the order of segments in bars are automatically updated.
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