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Occasionally you may have a graph which looks something like this. You’ll see we have
got one series which is fairly high and another series which is particularly low. Now in this
case we are not interested in the difference between the two, we are actually looking at
the shape. It is very difficult when there is such a low item here to actually tell the
shape. And this is where you can use something which is called the secondary axis. So what
you typically do is choose the item that is smaller, go to that series, right click on
it, and go and say Format Data Series. And you’ll see one of the options here is to
put it on a primary or secondary axis. Now if you look at this axis you’ll see it goes
from zero to 500 because these calls, the Vodacom calls, seem to show high numbers.
When I say Please put a secondary axis, what it does, is it takes the blue line, creates
a new axis appropriate for that blue line (as you can see these numbers are significantly
lower) and plots that graph so that this, the blue line is based on this axis, and the
red line is based on this axis. As you can imagine, it is difficult to tell which line
belongs to which axis. So there are a couple of ways you can do it, and as previously mentioned,
every part of the chart is customizable – so perhaps a good way – is this is a blue colour.
Let’s go to this axis, right click on it, say Format the Axis. You’ll see all the
options exist, for both sides of the axes – you can customize each of them. Go to
the Line Colour- I am going to change it to look the same colour as the series. Let’s
just go to Line Style – make it a little bit thicker. When I close it, you’ll see
that this axis is now the same colour as that line which makes it a little bit easier to
identify what we are looking at. Now another thing you can do is label the axes – so
if I go to my Chart Tools, under Layout, you’ll see we have got Axis Titles. Now because it
has seen that you have got a secondary axis, you’ll see there are now more options. We
are going to go to the Secondary Vertical Axis – we are going to ask for a rotated
title. You’ll see I have now got a title here and I can go and change it to tell me
what I should be looking at.