How to Create Hatched Charts in Excel

Hatched charts in Excel look beautiful. They look cool and professional. Hatching or shading between plotted lines enhances charts and helps to convey the story.

Creating hatched charts in Excel is rather easy (I'm using Excel 2013). For this illustration we will be using following set of data:

First hatched graph we will create for sales number only. Go to insert<Charts<Insert Area Charts. Insert the simple 2D area chart.

Now copy and paste the sales data into it. The graph will look like this.

Now format the axis label to include the years corresponding to the sales.

You can format the area as per your taste. Right click on the chart and click format data series. Go to fill and line and format it.

I personally like pattern fill, and my chart looks like this:

Now let's copy this chart and paste below the original. In the duplicate chart, let's add the profit numbers by copying and pasting it on the chart.

By slightly adjusting the pattern fill my chart look like this:

Now suppose I just want to shade or hatch the difference between the sales and profit. I can do this by doing white solid fill to the profit.

Now my chart looks like this.

Consider a case where we want to hatch the intersecting area between two series. Hatching such chart in Excel involves some tricks.

Let's consider the following data:

Following the above process, my chart will look like this:

However, I just want to hatch the intersecting area and not all the areas. For this we need to insert another series into this chart which should follow the contour of the area we don't want to be hatched.

I created another series called "Trick" for this purpose.