And think of other ways you could use this line, such as for targets, averages, national standard, yes keep dreaming! See a benchmark line in the wild in this dashboard report from Oregon Health Authority (scroll to, like, page 10). Just make it look like this table here:Īnd now the graph is WAY more powerful! We’ve added so much interpretation to the data visualization, helping the viewer understand how far the first two groups are from the target and by how much Group C exceeded it. Did that sentence make any sense? It was heavy on the nerd-speak. So this is cool but if you’d like your benchmark line to be a bit longer, you can just fiddle with the data table a little and select blank cells to add some space to the set of bars and associate the benchmark 65% with each blank spot. Of course, at first Excel tried to give me the value of the point, but just right-click on the point again and click Format Data Label and then select Series name and unselect Value. I also added the word “Benchmark” to the line by adding a data label to just the left most point. (This is a good time for me to mention that if I ever open a pub for data nerds, I’m going to call it The Benchmark Bar.) You can do this in 2010, too, just click on the benchmark bars and then click the Change Chart Type button in your Layout tab and select a line graph. In Excel 2013, I right-click on the orange benchmark bars and click Change Chart Type and then choose Line. Now it’s time to move that benchmark data from bars to a line. It’ll look like this, but don’t freak out:

In *that* dialogue box, select your Benchmark data. In that box that pops up, click the Add button to add a new series. Then right-click on the graph and click Select Data.

Highlight the group names and their data and insert a simple bar graph: I have my data and I have the benchmark value listed next to each. Here’s how to make one right inside Excel. Adding a benchmark line to a graph gives loads of context for the viewer.

How to histogram chart excel 2013