Excel Video 119 builds the outside ring of the speedometer chart. The trick to getting the outside of the speedometer chart to work is to select a doughnut chart as the chart type and then change the colors and rotate the doughnut. I’ll show you two different ways to change the colors in the doughnut chart. The key is to have no fill on the bottom 180 degrees of the doughnut so that the chart looks like a speedometer and shows the other 180 degrees. You can make the other colors in your speedometer red, yellow, and green like I did or you can choose whatever colors you’d like to match your dashboard. When you rotate the chart, you’ll probably have to rotate it either 90 degrees or 270 degrees, depending on whether the 180 degree section you want to hide is listed first or last in your group of data to chart.
The other trick in Excel Video 119 is to make low, medium, and high show up inside the correct chart areas. I do this with data labels. You need to add the group of cells with the low, medium, and high text to your chart as the horizontal axis. Then show the data labels and be sure to format the data labels so that the category name, not the value, is what Excel shows.
Stay tuned. Next time we’ll work on the indicator pointing to the correct outer section of our dashboard. Thanks for watching.
