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:

Sometimes you want to show a single chart with a series of different chart types. These charts containing data series with different chart types for each of them (lines, columns, areas, scatter, etc.) are called combo or combination charts:

Excel provides very few options for formatting horizontal axis labels. You cannot format different axis labels with different colors or font sizes. Conditional formatting also only works in some cases. You need to implement some tricks to format the horizontal axis, for example:

Excel provides very few options for formatting vertical axis labels. All axis labels are a single object - you can change the font size and color or apply effects to all labels at the same time. Even the gradient fill with the color of the axis labels works for us as for the whole item and not for individual objects.

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.

A revenue the company generates from selling the products or providing the services should cover the fixed costs, variable costs, and leave a contribution margin. The point where the total operating margin (the difference between the price of the product or service and the variable costs per item or customer) covers the fixed costs is called a break-even point.

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.

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:

One of the useful tricks to attain the attention of the audience and improve the effect of presenting your data is to use axis label formatting customized for the specific value ranges:

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: