Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 Inside Out

Using Multilevel Categories

Excel allows you to categorize your categories. This sounds redundant, but a quick example illustrates the technique. Suppose you want to plot the data shown in Figure 26-9 (The resulting chart is shown in Figure 26-10). The series are months and the categories are the sales offices located in different cities. The city sales are further classified by state, however. To create this multilevel chart, you simply select the data, including both columns of category information, and plot in the normal manner. Excel recognizes the second category column and creates the appropriate subcategories.

Figure 26-9. This worksheet uses ...