Excel 3 dimensional stacked bar chart howto

Question

One of our guys in the office wants to do a proper 3D stacked bar chart. In other words, he is not just interested in having a 3D rendering of the bars, but he needs full 3 dimensions for his data (x = region, y = quantities, z = year) and the stacks to show the contributions from relevant competitors and ourselves of sales.

So far I have not been able to figure out how to do this. It would appear that the built-in graphing libs cannot handle this. Search for plugins has been unsuccessful. I could probably do it using gnuplot, but the results wouldn't be to his linking.

Can anybody provide any ideas on how to go about this?

Answer 1

A 3D chart is not only very difficult to create, it is also very difficult to interpret. But you only have two numerical factors, quantities and years, and years are actually categorical.

Without worrying yet about stacking, you can show years along the X axis and quantities along Y, with the different regions represented by different columns clustered together. Standard clustered (grouped) column chart in MS Excel.

Then of course you want to stack up data for yourself and a few other entities, and damn, Excel only lets you cluster or stack your data.

Except that you can adjust your data to make Excel plot what you want, and I've written a little tutorial about these Clustered-Stacked Column Charts, in http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/clustered-stacked-column-charts/.