Cart

How to Create a Stacked Area Chart

Table of Contents

What is a Stacked Area Chart

Unlike Grouped Area Charts, which show areas one behind the other, all starting from the horizontal X axis, Stacked Area Charts show areas on top of each other. Areas with all either positive or all negative values can never overlap. Areas with mixed positive and negative values may overlap.

Full Stacked Area Charts normalize the sums of all stacked points to 100% height, and show each portion of the areas normalized as well.

Based on the area line style, we may have:

  1. Stacked Area Chart – for areas with straight lines (by default).
  2. Stacked Spline Area Chart – for areas delimited by curve (spline) lines.
  3. Stacked Step Area Chart – for areas delimited by a step line.

Steps to Create a Stacked Area Chart

Start Visual Xtractor or Data Xtractor. Connect to a database. Create or design a SQL query. Run the query and check the results.

  1. Display and enable the Chart query builder.
  2. Select one or more numeric columns with the Area Charts – Stacked Area chart.
  3. Change their line drawing style to one of straight, spline or step line.
  4. Select eventually a Label, for legend items and X axis labels.

Stacked Area Chart Demo Query

Look for ready-to-use Stacked Spline Areas generated chart query under the Queries > Demo Queries > Charts > Cartesian Charts folder. Click on the “add demo queries” command link, to make sure they’re all there.

Main difference for these area-based multi-series charts is you use multiple Stacked Area selections instead of Area selections. Then change its line drawing style (to a Curve Line here). You may use as well a semi-transparent fill background, in case your areas overlap.

Stacked Spline Area Chart
Generated demo queries must work for any database, with no restriction. They use constant values generated on-the-fly and your database SQL engine, but do not depend on data from your tables, and never alter your database in any way.

Customize your Stacked Area Chart

  1. Switch to a Full Stacked Step Area Chart, with Full and a Step Line drawing style.
  2. Show vertical data labels and point markers.
  3. Show as 3D.

Full Stacked 3D Step Area Chart

Conclusion

  • Creating Stacked Area Charts in Data Xtractor or Visual Xtractor is fast and simple: select some numeric columns as Stacked Area – instead of Area – and change their line style.
  • Full Stacked Areas are normalized to 100% in height.
  • All builtin powerful features of these chart type are common to most other charts: filtering series through the legend items, interactivity, monochrome or grayscale colors, rich axis and data label selections etc.
  • Switch to another builtin chart theme, or customize your own, for any possible color or other styles.