How to Create a Combo Chart in Excel

Trying to show total revenue next to a conversion rate on the same chart in Excel can feel like fitting a square peg in a round hole. The revenue numbers might be in the thousands, while the conversion rate is a single-digit percentage. The result is often a bar chart where one series is a skyscraper and the other is barely visible. A combo chart is the perfect solution for this exact problem. This article will walk you through exactly how to create a combo chart in Excel, step-by-step, and how to make it look clean and professional.

What Exactly is a Combo Chart?

A combination chart, or "combo chart," is a single graph that uses two or more different chart types to visualize different data series. The most common combination is a bar or column chart layered with a line chart. This simple pairing is incredibly powerful because it lets you tell a more nuanced story with your data.

The real magic of a combo chart comes from its ability to use a secondary axis. This means you can plot one data series against a scale on the left side (the primary vertical axis) and another data series against a completely different scale on the right side (the secondary vertical axis). This is how you can effectively plot revenue in the tens of thousands alongside a customer satisfaction score of 4.5 out of 5.

So Why Should You Bother with One?

• Compare Different Units of Measurement: This is the number one reason. You can track total sales revenue (in dollars) and the number of units sold (a raw number) on the same timeline.
• Show Relationships Between Data: You can visualize the relationship between marketing spend and website sessions. Did traffic go up when you increased your ad budget? A combo chart makes that connection immediately obvious.
• Highlight a Target vs. Actual Performance: A common use case is plotting actual monthly sales as bars and overlaying the sales target or quota as a line. You can see at a glance which months you hit your goal.
• Save Dashboard Space: Instead of creating two separate charts that your audience has to mentally connect, a combo chart packs the same information into one clear, easy-to-read visualization.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

Before you can make a chart, you need well-structured data. Thankfully, the setup for a combo chart is straightforward. You just need your data organized in columns with clear headers. There should be one shared column that will serve as your horizontal axis - this is usually a time series like a date, month, or quarter.

Let's use a common sales reporting example. We want to compare monthly sales revenue against the number of deals closed each month. Our data looks like this:

Notice how Total Revenue and Deals Closed are on drastically different scales. This dataset is a perfect candidate for a combo chart with a secondary axis.

Step 2: How to Create the Combo Chart in Excel

Once your data is clean and organized, creating the chart takes less than a minute. We'll use our sales data from the previous step.

1. Select Your Data

Click and drag your cursor to select the entire data range you want to chart, including the column headers. In our example, you would select cell A1 down to C7.

2. Insert the Combo Chart

With your data selected, navigate to the Insert tab on Excel's top ribbon. In the "Charts" section, find the small icon that looks like a bar and line chart together and click it. This is the "Insert Combo Chart" button.

A dropdown menu will appear with a few options:

• Clustered Column - Line: This is the standard combo chart, but both data series will share the same primary axis on the left.
• Clustered Column - Line on Secondary Axis: This is the one we want. It automatically assigns one data series to a new axis on the right.
• Stacked Area - Clustered Column: A variation for showing part-to-whole relationships.
• Create Custom Combo Chart: This opens a more detailed menu that gives you full control.

For our purposes, select Clustered Column - Line on Secondary Axis.

Excel will instantly generate a combo chart. It's smart enough to guess that the larger numbers (Total Revenue) should be the columns and the smaller numbers (Deals Closed) should be the line with its own axis.

3. Customize Your Chart (If Needed)

Sometimes Excel doesn’t guess perfectly, or maybe you want to change which data series is the line and which is the bars. No problem.

1. Right-click on your chart and select Change Chart Type....
2. This will open a dialog box with the "Combo" section already selected at the bottom.
3. Here, you can independently control each data series. For each series name (e.g., "Total Revenue," "Deals Closed"), you can choose its chart type from a dropdown and check a box to plot it on the Secondary Axis.

For example, you could make Total Revenue the line chart and Deals Closed the bars if you wanted to. This menu gives you total control.

Step 3: Polish Your Chart Like a Pro

Creating the chart is easy, but making it clear and professional takes a little refinement. A naked chart dropped into a report can cause more confusion than it clears up, especially with a secondary axis.

Give Your Chart and Axes a Title

A combo chart without labeled axes is pretty much unreadable. The audience won't know if the line corresponds to the left axis or the right axis.

• Chart Title: Double-click the default "Chart Title" text to give it a descriptive name like "Monthly Sales Revenue vs. Deals Closed."
• Axis Titles: Click on your chart. A small plus sign (+) will appear in the top-right corner. Click it, then check the box next to Axis Titles. This will add placeholders for a horizontal, primary vertical, and secondary vertical axis title. Edit them to be descriptive (e.g., "Total Revenue ($)" for the left axis and "Number of Deals Closed" for the right axis).

Adjust Colors and Formatting

Make your chart easy to read at a glance. You might make the bars a standard brand color, but give the line a bold, contrasting color to make it pop. You can change the color of any element by right-clicking on it and choosing Format Data Series, which opens up a side panel with options for fill color, border, line thickness, and more.

Clean Up Chart Elements

Less is often more. Consider clicking on the vertical gridlines and deleting them for a cleaner, less cluttered look. You can also reformat the axis labels. For instance, right-click the left vertical axis (the revenue numbers) and choose Format Axis.... You can change the format to Currency to automatically add dollar signs and commas, making it much easier to read.

Common Examples of Combo Charts in Business

To give you some ideas, here are a few practical situations where a combo chart is the best tool for the job.

Marketing Campaign Performance

You want to see how your daily ad spend correlates with the website traffic it generates. A combo chart is perfect here.

• Columns: Daily Ad Spend ($)
• Line with Secondary Axis: Website Sessions (Number)
• Insight: You can quickly see if ramping up spend directly results in more traffic, or if there's a point of diminishing returns.

Sales Team Efficiency

A manager wants to track the number of sales calls an agent makes versus the revenue they close. This helps spot if an agent is effective or just busy.

• Columns: Number of Sales Calls Made
• Line with Secondary Axis: Closed Revenue ($)
• Insight: An agent with few calls but high revenue is highly efficient. An agent with many calls but low revenue may need coaching on their sales process.

E-commerce Site Performance

You want to track your site's monthly visitor count against your conversion rate.

• Columns: Monthly Unique Visitors (Number)
• Line with Secondary Axis: E-commerce Conversion Rate (%)
• Insight: Did your conversion rate drop when you had a huge influx of traffic from a viral campaign? This chart helps you understand the relationship between traffic quantity and quality.

Final Thoughts

Combining different chart types in Excel is an incredibly useful skill that lets you display complex relationships in a simple, visual way. By using columns for volume metrics and lines for rate or different-scale metrics on a secondary axis, you can create reports that are clear, concise, and tell a powerful story with your data.

Of course, the process of exporting data from different platforms, cleaning it up in a spreadsheet, and manually building these charts every week can be a huge time-sink. That's actually why we built Graphed. We wanted a way to skip the spreadsheet process entirely. You just connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce - and ask for the chart you want in plain English. For example, asking for "a combo chart of Shopify revenue as bars and new customers as a line for the last 90 days" instantly builds a live dashboard for you, no Excel wrangling required.