Display excel grid lines in front of a chart?

Question

I have an area chart in Excel for Mac 2011 that I'd like to display grid lines in front of. Is there a way to do this? I know I could make the chart semi-transparent and show the grid lines through, but doing that makes the graph a bit hard to read.

Solution 1

Not possible I'm afraid. The grid is in a different layer to the chart but the same layer as the cell data. Transparent background to the chart is the only option or a semi-transparent overlay image (messy).

Solution 2

You best bet is to make the area series semi-transparent. This helps show the gridlines, and also makes the area fill colors less dark than the defaults (which are generally too dark).

Solution 3

Alternatively (and a bit bulky) you could put an x-y chart on the second axis (I believe by default the 2nd axis displays on top of the primary axis) and connect points with lines to create your own gridlines.

Hard to manage, though.

Comments

[Steve Desmond]

I've found setting transparency to 10% and major gridline color to black works well as a good start

[Jon Peltier]

I don't like using solid black gridlines, since that draws attention from the actual data. But transparent areas and bars also work with the default medium gray gridlines.

[Jon Peltier]

Or error bars, or whatever. A bit bulky, is right.