How to Add a Vertical Line to a Horizontal Bar Chart

Vertical Line Horizontal Bar ChartLeadExcel’s built-in chart types are great for quickly visualizing your data. The horizontal bar chart is a great example of an easy to use graph type. Sometimes, though, it can be useful to call attention to a particular value or performance level, like an average or a min/max threshhold. In that case, you’ll want to add a vertical line across the horizontal bars at a specific value. This quick tutorial will walk through a quick way to add a vertical line to the horizontal bar chart type in Excel. As an example, we’ll use annual sales performance with an average value line.

 Building a Basic Horizontal Bar Chart

First off, let’s examine the data set. We have a clean list of sales data for a set of employees…

Data Set

Let’s build a horizontal bar chart for the data. Select the Last Name and Sales columns.

Chart Selection

On the Insert menu tab under Charts, choose the Bar icon and select the Clustered Bar chart type.

Insert Clustered Bar

Without any more effort, here is what Excel produces for our data:

Base Graph