This is one of those problems where I feel that what I want to achieve is simple but to date it has stymied me.

I have an Excel chart that plots forecasts versus the sum of commitment and expenditure for each month of the year as a clustered column chart – that is there are 12 columns for the forecasts and 12 columns for the sum of the commitment and the expenditure.

I would like to change this to a combination column chart that still has 12 columns showing the forecast but the other 12 columns are stacked columns showing commitment and expenditure. (As commitments turn into expenditure the chart turns into a chart of forecasts vs expenditure.) Excel doesn’t want me to make this change and so far Excel is winning the battle!
Excel is happy for me to make up a combination chart, so long as I show the forecasts as a line graph, not columns – but that doesn’t make logical sense in terms of the data I want to display.

The current version of the chart does not rely on any VBA programming. I know that there is a way of achieving the chart that I would like by spending $45 on add-in software, which (a) seems excessively expensive and (b) can’t be introduced into my workplace’s computing environment anyway.

So, can anyone point me in the right direction for finding a solution to my problem? I am happy to consider solutions that involve VBA and those that do not.