3 Ways to Improve Readability of Excel Stacked Charts

Add Total Values, Percentages & Dynamic Legends

There is so much potential to improve the standard Excel stacked chart. For one, adding total values outside the last stack would ease comparison between categories.

Adding percentages to the stacks would also help identify and compare the stack sizes to one another.

One method I specially like, is to create a dynamic legend and to put the labels of each of the stacks (so not the data labels but the name of the stack) on the right hand side of the last category – as shown in the graph below.