“Actually an ordinary story, like Cinderella”… these are the words of an old hit from the ’80s, and they came to my mind as an illustration of what I want to describe in this text: a comparison chart of budgeted vs actual. If we use the display of data on the secondary axis, we can easily compare planned and realized values, which can be important for displaying intuitive reports.
In one of the earlier texts there were words on how to take advantage of the secondary axes to display disproportionate data series. The common problem here is the overlapping of the series. Therefore, the data is not sufficiently noticeable. By adjusting the width and gap between the series it can be slightly corrected. However, in order to make the data on the graph more noticeable, one can use a trick that will be described in the following text …
When we make charts that contain multiple data series, it happens that the data in them varies greatly, in terms of value ranges, or they are set in different units of measure. Also, we will sometimes want to show different series by using different chart types. For this purpose, we choose whether the series is displayed on the primary or secondary axis, and which type of chart we want to use to display the data on it.