How to make a graph in google sheets with multiple lines

Line charts are the easiest way to visualize your data in google sheets. It helps us to understand the data points in a better way.

While it is easier to plot and edit line charts with 2 data columns, it becomes complex when we have more than 2 columns. In this tutorial, we will see how to make a line chart with multiple lines in google sheets and how to edit them as per our needs.

Table of Content:-

1. Why do we need a line chart with multiple lines?
2. How to create a line chart with multiple lines?
3. Examples of multiple line charts with an advanced data set
4. When not to use line charts

Why do we need a line chart with multiple lines in google sheets?

We need multiple line charts to correlate the data points and discover if there are any patterns out there.

Suppose we have multiple data series which are collected at the same time or we want to compare data collected at different time periods, in such cases instead of making separate single line charts, we can use a single chart and plot multiple lines of the data series to make them much more presentable.

Example of multiple data collected at the same time:-

Here we have examined different people for their heart rate and blood oxygen level. We want to see what happens to blood oxygen levels when the heart rate falls.

In the above examples, we can plot a line graph with multiple lines to visualize. Here is how it will look:-

Let’s say we want have the below set of data about a company financials

Here we have year-wise sales, salaries, and net profit data. We want to visualize this in a presentable manner.

Step-1: Select all your data and labels that you want to visualize in a chart

Tip:- If the data you are selecting is the only data inside the spreadsheet, you can just choose one row and hit Ctl+A in windows or Cmd+A on a mac.

Step-2: With the data points selected, from the top menu, click on insert and select chart. This will bring up the chart with the default type.

Tip:- You can also click on the chart icon

Step-3:  By default, google sheets will show a bar chart. To convert the bar chart to a line chart, you need to change the chart type to a line chart inside the chart editor shown on the right-hand side.

Tip:- Most of the time a chart editor will appear automatically when you first insert a chart. But you can bring it up manually by double-clicking on the chart area or clicking on the 3 dot menu of the chart and selecting edit.

The final chart will look like this:-

This is how you create a line chart with multiple lines in google sheets.

Examples of multiple line charts with an advanced data set

Example-1: Multiple line chart with secondary Axis

Let’s take an example of the below set of data:-

Here is a data set about iPhone models with their price and sales numbers from an online marketplace. We want to plot this data as a line graph to understand what’s the correlation between iPhone models, their price, and sales volume.

We can select all the data points with labels and click on the insert chart from the insert menu. This will bring up the below chart.

As you can see from the chart, the price variation of different iPhone models is almost invisible on the chart.

This happened because of the higher range in Y-axis, which google sheets gave us by default. This high range is because google sheets looked at the minimum and maximum from sales volume and product price column and calculated the range.

This is a typical problem with line charts or multiple line charts. Line charts do not work well when you have a wide range of data. 

Here in this example, the range of iPhone product prices varies from $399 to $699. But the range of sales numbers is between 1 million to 10 million.

To solve this problem, we can plot a multi-line chart with a secondary axis. 

To do this, go to the chart edit window, and select the customize tab. Now expand the series option and select the series that you want to visualize on the second axis. Here we will select the “Price” series and then scroll down a bit to Axis selection. Here we will choose from the drop-down, right Axis. Now you will be able to see the line graph for price clearly.

The final chart will look like this:-

Here we can clearly see the correlation between all 3 data sets. We can see that excluding iphoneX, all other iPhones sell high where the product price is low. The secondary axis makes the data much more readable and presentable.

Example-2: Multiple line chart in combination with a column chart

In the previous example, we plotted a line chart with 3 parameters or labels. Now let us add one more data label to the same table.

Here we have added the camera pixel as one more data point. Let’s plot a multi-line chart similar to example-1.

As you can see the yellow line at the bottom is almost invisible. This is because we have added yet another set of data with an extensive range as compared to the other data series. Here the range is only between 8 to 12 which is very low compared to Price or Sales/month data.

This is a clear limitation of a line chart or multi-line chart. To solve this, we need to plot a bubble chart in google sheets. Here is how to do it:-

In the chart editor, under the setup tab, click on the chart type selection box and select bubble chart under Scatter plot type. When you do that, you will see this:-

As you can see here, the bubble chart is a much better visualization compared to the multi-line chart that we plotted earlier with the same set of data.

Here we can clearly see that iPhone 6 with 8 megapixels beats iphone8 with 10 megapixels in sales numbers.

When not to use line charts

1. Line graphs should only be used to show data over time
2. If there is a wide range of data, then it is difficult to read them via multiple line charts
3. If the scale on the axis is not consistent, then the line graph representation may not look accurate
4. Line charts do not work well when the data is in decimal or fraction format
5. If there are more series of data, then multiple line charts might look cluttered which is hard to interpret 

Wrapping up

In this tutorial, you learned how to create a line chart with multiple lines in google sheets. This is very helpful when working with multi-dimension data. I am confident that you can now create your own line chart with multiple lines in google sheets.

Appendix

[1] Learn more about line charts – Link

Learn about other types of charts like box and whisker plots in google sheets and bubble charts in google sheets.

New to google sheets ? Start here

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