In Excel 2003 go to the Chart menu, choose Chart Options, and check the Category (X) Axis checkmark. On the Excel 2007 Chart Tools > Layout tab, click Axes, then Secondary Horizontal Axis, then Show Left to Right Axis. There are no Rating labels because there is no secondary vertical axis, so we have to add this axis by hand. Right click on the new series, choose “Change Chart Type” (“Chart Type” in 2003), and select the clustered bar style. We now have two sets of columns in the chart. I chose the Dummy values of 2 just so the data would show up in the chart.Ĭopy this table above, select the chart, and use Paste Special to add the data to the chart using the settings below (the Excel 2007 dialog is very much like this Excel 2003 dialog). Rating 1 may stand for “Totally Lame” and Rating 5 for “Totally Awesome”. In our chart, fixing the scale at 1 to 5 makes sense.

However, the minimum possible score here is 1, and we’ll be using text labels. Note that I’ve violated the first rule of column chart value axis scales, which is that The Axis Scale Must Include Zero. Plot the responses for each question (the first two columns of the data) in a clustered column chart, and use the Error column as custom error bar values. Let’s assume the following dummy survey results. I’ll show the charts from Excel 2007, and the different dialogs for both where applicable. The steps are essentially the same in Excel 2007 and in Excel 2003. In this tutorial I’ll show how to use a combination bar-column chart, in which the columns show the survey results and the bars provide the text labels for the horizontal axis. There are several ways to accomplish this task. The data can be plotted by value, but it’s not obvious how to place the text labels on the chart in place of the numerical labels on the vertical axis. This may be a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 means “Completely Dissatisfied” and 5 means “Completely Satisfied”, with other labels in between.

When analyzing survey results, for example, there may be a numerical scale that has associated text labels.

Excel graph axis label text