How to Make a Cumulative Graph in Excel

A cumulative graph is one of the most effective ways to visualize progress toward a goal, whether you're tracking annual sales revenue, project milestones, or marketing campaign leads. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to set up your data and create a clear, professional-looking cumulative graph in Microsoft Excel.

What is a Cumulative Graph?

A cumulative graph, sometimes called an ogive, shows a running total of your data over time or across categories. Instead of showing the performance for each individual period (like sales in January, then February, then March), it adds each new period's value to the total of the periods that came before it. This creates a line that almost always goes up, showing the total accumulation toward a final number.

This is incredibly useful for a few reasons:

• Tracking Progress: It gives you an immediate visual answer to the question, "How are we tracking toward our goal?" You can see if you're ahead of schedule, behind schedule, or right on track.
• Seeing the Big Picture: While a standard bar chart is good for comparing individual months, a cumulative chart focuses on the overall momentum and the end result.
• Identifying Trends: The slope of the cumulative line tells a story. A steep incline means rapid growth, while a flattening curve indicates a slowdown.

Common Examples of Cumulative Graphs

You can apply this concept to almost any metric you're tracking:

• Sales: Tracking cumulative monthly sales to see if you're on pace to hit your annual revenue target.
• Marketing: Monitoring cumulative leads from a campaign to see if you'll reach your lead generation goal by the end of the quarter.
• Project Management: Visualizing the cumulative number of tasks completed to track a project's overall progress against a deadline.
• E-commerce: Tracking cumulative customer sign-ups or orders during a promotional period.

Step 1: Set Up Your Data for a Cumulative Graph

The key to a good graph is well-organized data. Before you can build anything in Excel, you need a table with your raw data and a new column for your cumulative calculation.

Let's use a common example: a small e-commerce business tracking its monthly sales revenue. Your starting table should look something like this:

Column A: Month Column B: Monthly Sales

To create the cumulative totals, you will add a third column, "Cumulative Sales." This column will contain the running total.

How to Calculate the Cumulative Total in Excel

The cumulative formula is surprisingly simple. You create it once in the first cell and then drag it down to automatically fill the rest of the column.

1. Click into the first cell of your cumulative column (in our example, that's cell C2). The first value in a cumulative series is just itself, so the formula is simply a reference to the first monthly sales value:

=B2

1. Press Enter. Cell C2 will now show the same value as B2.
2. Now, click into the second cell (C3). This is where the "cumulative" part begins. The formula here needs to take the cumulative total from the previous month (C2) and add the current month's sales (B3):

=C2+B3

1. Press Enter. Cell C3 will now show the combined total of January and February sales.
2. Here's the best part. You don’t have to type that formula for every cell. Click on cell C3 once more. You'll see a small green square at the bottom-right corner — this is the "fill handle." Hover your mouse over it until the cursor turns into a black plus sign, then click and drag it all the way down to the end of your data.

Excel will automatically update the formula for each row, always adding the current month's sales to the previous cumulative total. Your table is now ready for charting!

Step 2: Create a Combination Chart in Excel

For the best visualization, we'll create a combination chart. This will show your individual monthly sales as bars and the cumulative progress as a connected line overlaid on top. It gives you the best of both worlds: a view of monthly performance and the overall trend.

1. Select Your Data

Start by selecting the columns you want to graph. Click and drag to highlight your "Month" and "Monthly Sales" columns, including the headers. Now, hold down the Ctrl key (or Cmd on Mac) and select the "Cumulative Sales" column as well. Using Ctrl/Cmd allows you to select non-adjacent columns.

2. Insert a Combo Chart

With your data selected, navigate to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon. In the Charts section, find and click the "Insert Combo Chart" icon (it looks like a small bar chart with a line graph over it). From the dropdown, select "Create Custom Combo Chart..." at the very bottom.

3. Configure the Chart Axes

A new window will pop up. This is where you tell Excel how to handle each data series. Because your cumulative sales numbers will be much larger than your monthly sales, it's best to plot them on separate axes.

• For the "Monthly Sales" series, set the Chart Type to Clustered Column.
• For the "Cumulative Sales" series, set the Chart Type to Line.
• Most importantly, check the box under "Secondary Axis" for the "Cumulative Sales" series.

This places the scale for monthly sales on the left (primary) vertical axis and the larger scale for cumulative sales on the right (secondary) vertical axis. Click OK.

You now have a basic cumulative graph!

Step 3: Customize and Format Your Cumulative Graph

The default chart is functional, but a few formatting tweaks can make it much clearer and more professional.

Add and Edit Titles

A graph without clear titles is just decoration. Double-click the default "Chart Title" and give it a descriptive name, like "2024 Monthly vs. Cumulative Sales".

To add axis titles, click on your chart, then click the green plus sign (Chart Elements) that appears on the top right. Check the box for "Axis Titles." You can now edit them:

• Left Vertical Axis Title: Monthly Sales ($)
• Right Vertical Axis Title: Cumulative Sales ($)
• Horizontal Axis Title: Month

Adjust Colors and Formatting

You can change the color of the bars and the line for better readability. Right-click on a bar and choose "Format Data Series..." to change the fill color. Do the same for the line — you can change its color, thickness, and even add markers for each data point to make it stand out.

Add a Goal Line (Optional but Recommended)

One of the most powerful additions to a cumulative graph is a visual goal line. This makes it instantly clear how performance is tracking against a target.

1. Go back to your data table and add a new column called "Annual Goal."
2. In this column, enter your year-end sales target in every cell. Let's say your goal is $500,000.
3. Right-click your chart and choose "Select Data."
4. Click "Add" under Legend Entries (Series).
5. Click OK. Excel will add your goal as another line.
6. Right-click the new goal line on your chart and select "Change Series Chart Type." Change its chart type to a simple "Line."
7. Right-click it again and choose "Format Data Series." You can change the line style to a dash or dot pattern and pick a distinct color (like red or grey) to make it stand out as a target.

Final Thoughts

Creating a cumulative graph in Excel might seem tricky at first, but it's really just a two-step process: calculating the running total in your table and then using the Combo Chart feature to visualize it. This type of chart tells a much richer story than a standard bar graph, helping your entire team see both short-term performance and long-term progress in a single view.

While Excel is fantastic for manual analysis, building these reports across different platforms — like pulling sales from Shopify, expenses from Google Ads, and CRM data from HubSpot — means you're starting this "export and wrangle" process from scratch every week. At Graphed, we automate that entire workflow. You connect your data sources once, and can then simply ask for what you need - "create a dashboard showing cumulative monthly revenue from Shopify versus our annual goal" - and get a live, real-time dashboard in seconds, no formulas required.