Let’s say you want a single chart to show data series with differing orders of mag- nitude. Perhaps you want to illustrate revenue in millions of dollars and gross profit percent on the same chart. Excel 2003 offered a method for creating this chart type, even if it was hidden where few would find it. Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 still allow this type of chart, but it is tougher to create. Easy in Excel 2003 Back in Excel 2003, choose Insert Chart. In the first step of the chart wiz- ard, click on the Custom Types tab. Scroll down to the Line – Column on 2 Axes chart type, as shown in Figure 1. Excel will take care of formatting the chart with two axes and will place the last series as a line chart on the sec- ondary axis. While using the Chart Wizard made this type of chart easier in Excel 2003, the process wasn’t flexible. What if you wanted to have one series shown as a column chart and two series shown as a line chart tied to the secondary axis? That type wasn’t supported in the Chart Wizard. If you need to do anything more complicated than the basic column or line chart in Excel 2003, the following steps will allow you to create many dif- ferent types of combination charts. Creating a Custom Combination Chart in Excel 97 through 2010 Begin by plotting all of your series as a 2- D clustered column chart. Don’t use 3-D chart types, as you can’t create a combination chart where one of the series is a 3-D chart type. In Figure 2, there are three series to be plotted on the chart. The size of the revenue series causes the Gross Profit Percentage (GP%) and Customer Sat- isfaction Percentage (Cust sat%) series to be too small to see, so you would like to move those two series to a secondary axis. The Charting Toolbar in Excel 2003 or the Layout tab in Excel 2007/2010 start with a dropdown list of chart elements. Open that dropdown and choose 54 STRATEGIC FINANCE I November 2010 TECHNOLOGY EXCEL Excel Charting Using a Second Axis By Bill Jelen Figure 1