Excel Graphing

[J.T.]

I need to make a graph that combines a stacked bar graph and a grouped bar graph. Does anyone know if this can be done?

Thanks!

[Agtuary]

Maybe if you give an example of what you want it would be easier to help.

[Dr T Non-Fan]

I don't think it's possible.
Cut losses and make two graphs. Put them on one page, if necessary.

[J.T.]

What I'm looking for is some way to have the data (Property, Auto, and Liability) grouped by years, and for each section, such as property, have it stacked with losses (on the bottom) and allocated expenses(on top of the losses).

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

I don't have a copy of Excel handy, but can you create two graphs, set the background of one of the graphs to transparent, and stack them?

[whisper]

Suppose you have this:
Line Yr Loss ALAE
a 1 x1 y1
a 2 x2 y2
b 1 x3 y3
b 2 x4 y4

You could create another column, Line and Year where you concatenate Line and Yr into 1 column. Then graph on the concatenated column, loss and ALAE.

[wally world]

I think you could do as whisper suggested, only you don't even need to concatenate the first two columns. You won't get three nice bars for, say, 1999 all right next to each other, but it's better than nothing I guess.

[CaptainCavy]

Stagger the data. To get the years to line up you might have to play with secondary axes. Then play with the colors of the charted ranges to get the effect you want. This gets in the range of messing with chart-junk, however (e.g., it's easy to hide increasing expenses if the claims are decreasing). I have an example chart doing just this... email me at nuttycavy@yahoo.com and I'll be happy to send it to you.

Generally the data should look like this

A B C D E F G
1 Yr PL PE AL AE LL LE
2 # #
3 1998 # #
4 # #
5
6 # #
7 1999 # #
8 # #

etc. The blank lines are so that data for different years doesn't run together. Note you might have to play with which row the year labels go into so that they chart correctly and fiddle with some other chart settings.