I want to graph my buisnesses departmental sales for 2004, 2005, 2006 as well
as the total sales for those years. If I use the same y-axis for the
departments and total, the department bars are too small to be meaningful. I
would like to graph the total sales against the right hand y-axis. I have
tried the secondary axis but Excel lumps the Total numbers into the first
department. Any Suggestions??

Typically a graph is meant to visually show the similarities and
differences or cycle-to-cycle changes between related groups of
figures. For instance: a graph of swimwear department sales would show
a decline in winter months and an increase in summer months. Including
the "total sales for all departments" figure in that graph skews the
scaling of the graph (as you've found out) and includes unnecessary
data in your comparison, because although swimwear dept. sales are a
part of total sales, you can't tell from the graph what part of total
sales is swimwear (unless it's a separate pie chart). My suggestion
is: remove "total sales all departments" from the departmental graphs
and include a summary graph showing total sales for 2004 2005 2006.

Dave O has a point. If you are using secondary axis to display the data,
Excel will shove the bars over each other, if thats what you mean. This
happens if you have a 3-dimentional graph. Change it to a 2 dimentional chart
and it should be OK

If I misunderstood, please ignore

Cheers
Eddie


"Dave O" wrote:

Typically a graph is meant to visually show the similarities and
differences or cycle-to-cycle changes between related groups of
figures. For instance: a graph of swimwear department sales would show
a decline in winter months and an increase in summer months. Including
the "total sales for all departments" figure in that graph skews the
scaling of the graph (as you've found out) and includes unnecessary
data in your comparison, because although swimwear dept. sales are a
part of total sales, you can't tell from the graph what part of total
sales is swimwear (unless it's a separate pie chart). My suggestion
is: remove "total sales all departments" from the departmental graphs
and include a summary graph showing total sales for 2004 2005 2006.