How to Create a Floating Chart

This is quite an interesting kind of chart in this Excel tutorial. Here you will learn how to create floating bars and put them into your chart.

1. Consider the data set for the chart.

data set to insert a floating plot in Excel

How to create floating bars graph?

2. Select all the data set. Go to the ribbon. Click Insert and in the Column option, select 2D Stacked Column.

2D Stacked column

3. Then a chart window will appear like below. Now to make it floating bars chart, right click on the lower shaded part. Select Format Data Series option.

Format Data Series

How do the graph bars float?

4. On selecting the data series option, a window will appear like this below. Choose the Fill option from the left-hand side and select No Fill.

Format Data Series

5. After step 4, the bars in the chart window become floating bars, as shown in fig. below. Now in tool bar under Layout option select Data Labels. Choose Center.

Data Labels

6. Here you go with the chart with floating bars. You can use it for timeline presentations of some process results. It looks much better when values increase, like in the example below.

chart with floating bars ready

Your floating chart is now ready to use. You can also customize it further by changing the chart type, formatting the chart elements, and adding labels or data markers as needed.