Vertical lines are usually added to the chart to highlight the current date, a critical date, or a deadline. There are many ways to add a vertical line to the existing chart. Errors bars are the easiest way to add a vertical line to a scatter plot. See how to add a vertical line to a line or bar chart or a horizontal line to a scatter plot, line, or column chart:

Usually, horizontal lines are added to a chart to highlight a target, threshold, limits, base, average, or benchmark. These lines, for example, can help control if a process is behaving differently than usual. Excel allows you to add a vertical line to an existing chart in several different ways, e.g., by calculating line values for a scatter, line, or column chart, but using error bars is the easiest way to add a vertical line to a chart:

In this tip, we will show how to combine two different chart types into one chart. For example, to merge a Bubble chart with an Area chart:

If you have a line chart with two different data series, you might want to compare those series at each point along the horizontal axis. There are two different options available in two locations, along with the Chart Design tab of the ribbon:

This is the second part of the tip How to create a Marimekko or Mekko chart in Excel. In the first part of this tip, a step Area chart was created:

To show progress, highlight current or any date, or demonstrate the difference between the target value and the actual one, you can add bullets to the chart, horizontal or vertical lines:

Excel offers many different pre-defined chart types, but for some data, pre-defined charts such as area charts or line charts can look fine but are incorrect.

If you need to create a simple Gantt chart, see Creating a Gantt chart or Gantt chart with progress. To add events to your Gantt chart, see Progress Gantt chart with events. This tip will help you to extend those charts by a vertical line that shows the current date.

Is it really necessary to create a chart in Excel and then import it to your PowerPoint presentation? Here you will see how to create a complex chart in PowerPoint that later will be used for adding additional effects.

Gantt charts illustrate project schedules and, thus, often used by project managers. Project management tools like Microsoft Project are better suited for Gantt charts, but it is easy to create a Gantt chart in Excel following the simple steps.