How do you 'overlay' one graph onto another in Numbers?

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Level 1

1 points

How do you 'overlay' one graph onto another in Numbers?

I'm working on a survey and I want to show that the composition of my sample is representative of national trends in terms of gender, occupation, religious affiliation, etc. And I want to represent this graphically by, e.g., displaying the proportion of males and females in the UK population in a bar chart (49% and 51%), and then overlaying onto that the proportion of males and females in my survey (which is more like 40% and 60%), so that the two sets of figures are on top of one another and the reader can judge from that how representative my group is.

How do I do that in Numbers?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)

Posted on Feb 10, 2015 5:12 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 10, 2015 5:50 AM in response to Tokido

Drag one chart on top of the other.

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Answer 2

Yellowbox

Level 7

21,945 points

Feb 10, 2015 5:56 AM in response to Tokido

Hi Tokido,

I am not sure what you are trying to do.

Yes, you can overlay charts (graphs). Slide one chart over another.

Or... Would a stacked chart work for you?

Please reply with more information.

Regards,

Ian.

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Answer 3

Tokido Author

Level 1

1 points

Feb 10, 2015 6:15 AM in response to Yellowbox

The problem with just dragging one on top of the other is that they still act as 2 different graphs. It's also difficult to make the one underneath visible.

A stacked column graph doesn't work either because that puts one column on top of the other. I want them laying on top of one another so that it's easier to compare their relative size. The best near solution I've found so far is to simply use a standard column graph, but with two series (one with the population data, one with my sample data). That puts the two columns for each category (male and female) side-by-side so you can compare easily, but it's not quite what I want.

I want something more like this:

http://i.stack.imgur.com/0YGFD.png

It doesn't have to look exactly like that but hopefully you can see what I mean.

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Answer 4

Badunit

Level 7

30,708 points

Feb 10, 2015 7:59 AM in response to Tokido

The chart in your linked image uses semi-transparent colors (not 100% opacity) for the column colors. If you do that with two overlaid charts, you will get the same effect. In my opinion, though, one chart with the columns side by side is more typical, just as easy to do the comparison, and simpler to make.

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