How to Plot Multiple Data Sets in Excel

Trying to visualize how your website traffic impacts sales, or how your ad spend correlates with new leads? Plotting multiple data sets on a single Excel chart turns spreadsheets full of numbers into a clear, compelling story about what’s really working. This guide will walk you through several methods for creating powerful, easy-to-read charts that compare different metrics side-by-side.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Good Charting Starts with Good Data Structure

Before you even click the "Insert Chart" button, the most important step is setting up your data correctly. A little prep work here will save you a lot of headaches later. For Excel to understand your data, it needs to be organized in a clean, tabular format.

Imagine you want to compare three metrics for the first half of the year: Website Sessions, Email Signups, and Total Sales. Your data should look something like this:

A shared column, typically a time-based category like "Month," will serve as your horizontal axis (the X-axis). Each additional column represents a different data series you want to plot - these will become the lines, bars, or columns on your chart.

• Column A (The Shared Axis): A label for each data point (e.g., Jan, Feb, Mar). This is what all your other data will be plotted against.
• Columns B, C, D (The Data Series): The numerical values for each metric you want to compare for each month.

Once your data is neatly arranged, you're ready to start building your chart.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Method 1: The Quick and Easy Way

This is the most straightforward method for plotting data sets that share a similar scale (e.g., all numbers are in the hundreds or thousands).

Step 1: Create Your Initial Chart

Start by highlighting the data for your first series, including the shared axis labels.

• In our example, highlight cells A1 through B7 (the "Month" and "Website Sessions" data, including headers).
• Go to the Insert tab on the Ribbon.
• In the Charts section, choose your preferred chart type. A line chart is usually a great choice for showing trends over time.
• Excel will instantly generate a chart showing your Website Sessions per month.

Step 2: Add Your Second Data Set

Now, let's add "Email Signups" to the same chart.

1. Right-click anywhere on the chart and choose Select Data.
2. A "Select Data Source" pop-up window will appear. In the left-hand box labeled "Legend Entries (Series)," click the Add button.
3. This opens the "Edit Series" window. Now you'll tell Excel what data to add:
4. Click OK. You'll now see your second data series has been added to the list.

Repeat Step 2 for any other data sets you want to include, like "Total Sales." When you're done, click "OK" on the "Select Data Source" window. You should now have a multi-line chart comparing your different metrics.

Method 2: Creating a Combo Chart for Mismatched Scales

What happens when you want to compare two data sets that are on completely different scales? For instance, let's say your "Website Sessions" are in the thousands, but "Total Sales" amount to millions of dollars. If you plot them on the same axis, the "Website Sessions" line will look almost completely flat near the bottom, robbing it of any meaning.

The solution is a combo chart with a secondary axis. This gives each data series its own Y-axis (vertical axis), so each one is scaled appropriately.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Step 1: Create a Basic Chart with All Data

Unlike the previous method, start by selecting all of your data at once—the shared axis and all numerical data series (cells A1 through D7 in our example).

• Go to Insert > Charts and select a basic Line or Column chart.
• The chart will look messy, with the smaller data points barely visible. Don't worry, that's what we're about to fix.

Step 2: Change the Chart Type to a Combo Chart

1. Right-click on the chart and select Change Chart Type.
2. In the "Change Chart Type" window, go to the Combo category at the bottom of the list on the left.
3. You'll now see a list of your data series in the middle of the screen ("Website Sessions," "Email Signups," "Total Sales"). Excel lets you choose a chart type for each one individually. This is where the magic happens.

Step 3: Assign a Secondary Axis

Let's say "Total Sales" is the metric with the vastly different scale.

• Leave "Website Sessions" and "Email Signups" as Line charts.
• For the "Total Sales" series, find it in the list and check the box next to it under the Secondary Axis column.
• You'll immediately see a second Y-axis appear on the right side of your chart preview, scaled appropriately for your sales data.
• For even better visual clarity, you could change the chart type for "Total Sales" to "Clustered Column." This creates a great visual combination where the trend lines overlay the sales bars.

Click OK. You now have a professional-looking combo chart that clearly displays the trends of data sets with very different scales, all in one consolidated view.

Pro Tip: Use Excel Tables for Auto-Updating Charts

One of the most common frustrations with Excel charts is that they don't automatically update when you add new data. If you add July’s data to your range, you have to go back into "Select Data" and manually expand the selection to include the new row. This is tedious, especially for weekly or monthly reports.

The fix is to use an Excel Table.

1. Before creating your chart, click anywhere inside your data range.
2. Go to the Insert tab and click Table. Excel will automatically guess your data range. Ensure "My table has headers" is checked and click OK.
3. Your data will now be formatted as a dynamic table (you'll see filter arrows appear in your headers).
4. Now, build your chart using any of the methods above, using the data within the Table.

From now on, whenever you type or paste a new row of data directly below the table, the table will automatically expand to include it. Better yet, your chart will instantly update to show the new data, no manual resizing required! This is a simple trick that will save you endless time.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Best Practices for Clean & Readable Charts

Creating the chart is only half the battle. Making it easy for others (and your future self) to understand is just as important.

• Choose the Right Chart Types: Use line charts for continuous data over time (like traffic or revenue). Use column or bar charts for comparing distinct categories (like signups per channel). A combo chart, as we saw, is perfect for comparing different types of data.
• Use Contrasting Colors: Don't rely on Excel's default blue, orange, and gray. In the "Chart Design" tab, choose a color palette with high contrast so each line or bar is clearly distinguishable.
• Don't Overclutter: A chart with two or three data series is easy to read. A chart with ten becomes a confusing mess. If you have too many series, consider breaking them out into multiple charts.
• Write a Descriptive Title: Instead of "Chart Title," use something that tells a story, like "Website Traffic and Sales Growth Moved in Lockstep in Q2."
• Label Everything: Make sure you have a clear legend so people know what each color represents. And if you’re using a secondary axis, be sure to add an axis title to both the left and right Y-axes so it's obvious what each scale is measuring. You can add these elements by clicking the green "+" icon next to your chart.

Final Thoughts

That's everything you need to know about plotting multiple sets of data. You've learned how to properly structure your data, how to create multiline charts, how to use a combo chart with a secondary axis for different data scales, and how to use Excel Tables to create dynamic charts that update automatically. Now you have the tools to show how different parts of your business relate to each other in one simple visual.

Making these charts in Excel is a valuable skill, but pulling all of that performance data together from different SaaS platforms, cleaning it, and organizing it for analysis is often the most time-consuming part of the process. At Graphed, our goal is to automate that entire manual workflow for you. Instead of exporting CSVs from Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Shopify, you can connect them to us in a few clicks. Then, just ask questions in plain English like "show me a chart comparing website sessions vs new deals from Salesforce by month this year." We generate a live dashboard for you in seconds, no spreadsheet wrangling required.