How to create a dual-axis chart
Dual-axis charts are available for all users on the Business plan. To try out dual-axis charts without a business plan, hover over the chart below and click on Edit this chart.
Dual-axis charts combine two vertical axes with differing units or scales into a single chart with one, shared horizontal axis, and also known double Y chart, combo charts, superimposed charts, or mixed line-and-bar series. In Datawrapper, you can visualise your dual-axis data as lines, areas or columns.
This guide will show you how to create the following chart, which visualizes mean rainfall and mean temperatures per month in Perth, Australia.
Prepare & import the data
The data for our chart comes from the Australian Government here. We prepared the data in this Google Spreadsheet.
No matter which data you choose, it needs to look the following for a proper dual-axis chart:
- One header row defining the titles of our data series
- One column containing the dates/times that will be plotted on the horizontal axis. You'll find an overview of date formats that Datawrapper will interpret correctly here.
- Two or more columns containing the values for each data series that will be visualized.
The values do not have to be of the same measure (in our examples, rainfall in mm and temperature in degree Celcius) – in fact, your dual-axis chart will be easiest to understand if they're not.
This is how the data for our chart looks like:
| Month | Max temp. | Min temp. | Rainfall in mm |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 31.4 | 18.2 | 15.9 |
| February | 31.7 | 18.4 | 12.7 |
| March | 29.7 | 16.9 | 20 |
| April | 26 | 13.8 | 35.1 |
| May | 22.5 | 10.6 | 85.5 |
| June | 19.5 | 8.7 | 127.1 |
| July | 18.5 | 8.1 | 147 |
| August | 19.2 | 8.5 | 125.2 |
| September | 20.7 | 9.7 | 79.9 |
| October | 23.5 | 11.7 | 40 |
| November | 26.8 | 14.4 | 24 |
| December | 29.6 | 16.6 | 9.6 |
Your data is ready to go? Great! Click here to create a new chart in Datawrapper. This link brings you automatically to Step 1 — Upload Data. Here you can simply copy and paste your data into the big white text field:
You can also upload a CSV or Excel, or even use data from a server. To learn more, visit this Academy article.
Once your data is uploaded in Datawrapper, it's time to check it. To do so, click on Proceed in the lower left corner. This will bring you to:
Check & Describe
Once you click on Step 2 — Check & Describe (or on Proceed), you'll see that Datawrapper puts your data into a neat table:
Datawrapper automatically detects data formats (number, dates, or text) and empty cells. In our example, the first column is green – a column with dates. The other three columns are blue and right-aligned, meaning Datawrapper recognized the cells as numbers. If necessary, you can manually change the data format by clicking on the column header and selecting a different format.
For now, that looks good, so let's click on Step 3 — Visualize, to see your data visualized:
Visualize
Step 3 — Visualize, has four substeps: Chart type, Refine, Annotate, and Layout. In the first step, Chart type, you can play around to see which visualization type will work best for your data.
Since we’re creating a dual-axis chart, you’ll want to click on Dual Axis at the bottom.
And that's it! Congratulations. You just created a dual-axis chart. We'll cover how you can customize and style your chart in the next tutorial, Customizing your dual-axis chart.