Google Sheets - Area chart

In this tutorial we will make an area chart like this:

Area chart is a close variant of line chart. Area chart also shows trend over time. Area chart shadow the area under lines to emphasize size of the magnitude.

Suppose the following data shows revenue and expense of a person for each month of the last year.

1. Select the data. On menu click Insert > Charts. Ignore the chart type recommended by Google Sheets, under Chart type, select Area chart.

2. Now you have an area chart. The blue area shows revenue. The red area shows expense. The orange area shows expenses were higher than revenue in March and December.

Stacked area chart

Depending on the purpose of your analysis, you may choose stacked area chart instead of the regular area chart. Stacked area chart shows sum of data series at each time point. For example, if a company sells its product to US and Canada market, the sales data for each month is below.

Select the data. On menu click Insert > Charts. For chart type, select Stacked area chart.

Now you see a stacked area chart showing sales in each country and total sales for each month.

General area chart or stacked area chart

Which one should you choose, general area chart or stacked area chart? It depends on your analysis purpose. If you main interest is the difference between the data series, choose the general area chart. If you are more interested in the sum of the data series, choose stacked area chart.

Comments

Excel - Solver examples

Excel Solver is used to solve optimization problems, which is like solving equations. In this tutorial, we will give a very simple example on how to use Excel Solver. Basic example Suppose your car is low on gasoline. The gasoline is $3/gallon. You have a budget of $50. How much gasoline can you buy? Of course, for a problem this simple, we do not even need a Solver to solve the problem. However, the purpose is to teach the users how to use Excel Solver, so we make the problem extremely simple. We have the following framework: Goal: maximize quantity of gasoline Relationship: cost=quantity * unit price Constraint: cost<=budget 1. In cell B1, we enter unit price "3", in cell B4, we enter the budget 50. In cell B2, we just enter an arbitrary number as the number of gallons. We entered 5. In cell B3, we enter the formula "=B1*B2" to let it be the cost, which equals to 15. 2. Click Solver under the Data menu. 3. A Solver dialog window pops up. In "Set objective...

Excel - How to count the number of sign changes (from + to - or vice versa) in a column?

Suppose you have a column of numbers and the data can be positive or negative. How do you count the number of times the data changes from positive to negative, or vice versa? We will use three functions, SIGN , INT and SUM to solve the problem. First we add a helper column B, name it "sign", then use SIGN function to get its sign. If the data is positive, it returns 1. If the value is negative, it returns -1. The formula is like: =SIGN(A2) Then we add another helper column C, call it "sign change", which checks whether sign of the current value is different from the last value. INT function is used to return the logical value TRUE or FALSE into 1 or 0. At last, at the end of column C, we use a SUM function to sum all the value changes. In this example, the data sign changes for 4 times (-1 to -3, -3 to 4, 2 to -5, and -5 to 6). VBA method Below is the VBA code to achieve it. You need to add a clickable button on the spreadsheet and assign the following code t...

Excel - Convert between mile, kilometer and meter

Excel has a very useful function convert numbers from one measure unit to another, for example, from Fahrenheit to Celsius, or from mile to kilometer. The function is CONVERT . For example, if we want to convert temperature 1.2 mile to kilometer, how to do it? One way is using the equation: 1 mile = 1.60934 kilometer If you do not know the conversion equation, you can just use the CONVERT function. Since kilometer is not a basic unit in the CONVERT function, you need to convert mile into meter first and then to kilometer. For example: =CONVERT(1.2,"mi","m") will turn mile into meters. If you divided the above number by 1000, you will get kilometer. =CONVERT(1.2,"mi","m")/1000 See the following figure for example. You can also convert kilometer into mile in a similar way. You first need to convert kilometer into meter, then use the CONVERT function. The formula is: =CONVERT(2.35*1000,"m","mi")

Calc Blog

Search This Blog