Creating a Fan Chart in Excel

Mary Eleanor Spears provides an example of a ‘Fan Chart’ in her book 'Charting Statistics’ (McGraw Hill Book Company. 1952):

The Fan Chart is in effect a variation of the Slope Chart. It shows relative change rather than absolute change. So all points on the Left Hand side start on zero.

A version can be produced relatively easily in Excel:

This version was made from the following starting data:

The main steps were:

Create a basic line chart from the data
Select Data Source: Switch Row/Column
Delete legend
Delete header
X Axis: set  label position high
Format each data series line colour and thickness
Format Y axis tick marks and line
Format Y axis so that X axis crosses at zero
Format Y axis maximum value to 10
Delete all gridlines
Set X axis position on tick marks
Add data labels (to right)
Delete all LH data labels (carefully so as not to delete RH at same time)
Format each RH label with

• Series name not value
• No leader lines
• Position to Right side

One way to add the shading outside of the data range is to create a second chart and overlay the fan chart. Create a clone of the chart and turn that into an area chart, being careful not to change the size at all. Turn the plot area of the clone grey and turn the fill of the wedges within the data area white

Then copy the line version of the fan chart and position it over the area version (making the top chart see-through by use of 'No Fill') settings). Here is a screenshot of the effect: