With the R7 update, you can create multi series charts easily.  What this means is you can have a chart showing up to five fields (y axis) against a single category field (x axis).  An example of what you could use this for would be comparing projected sales (Est. Revenue) vs. actual sales (Actual Revenue) per fiscal quarter (Est. Close Date (Quarter)) from your Opportunity entity.

You would set up this chart by going to the Opportunity entity area in the Sales section.  Find the “Charts” tab near the top and click the “Chart Pane” button.  I prefer showing the chart pane at the “Top” for this, as it provides more visibility.  After the chart pane is showing, click the “New Chart” button.

Under the “Legend Entries (Series)” heading is a dropdown menu of all the fields available for charting from the current entity.  Find “Est. Revenue” under this heading and make sure the dropdown on the side says “Sum”.  Under Est. Revenue, click the “Add a series” button.

 This gives us another field to report on.  Open the dropdown and find the “Actual Revenue” field.  In the Category dropdown search and find the “Est. Close Date” field.  If you’ll notice to the right of “Est. Close Date” you can set the period for the category. In this example set it to “Quarter”.  After doing this, the chart is complete.  You can give it a new name instead of “Est. Revenue, Actual Revenue by Est. Close Date” if you’d like, or even change the format of the chart to Area or Line.  I would not recommend Stacked or 100% Stacked Column or Areas for this view, as this is a comparison between two values.  Go ahead and save the chart, and you’re done!

One important thing to notice is that there are now two different Y-Axes for the chart.  The left Axis is the scale for the first series (Est. Revenue) and the right Axis is the scale for the second series (Actual Revenue).   If you want a more direct comparison (using the same exact scale for both) you need to manually edit the XML of the chart.  Don’t fret! This change is fairly simple, so give it a chance and you’ll be happy with the results.  You’ll notice the examples below show how much doing this can change the way a chart looks.  On the left we have two Y Axes, and the Actual Value looks to be higher than Est. Revenue across the board, but when we directly compare the two a much different story is told.

After saving the chart, have the chart showing in the Chart Pane.  Once it’s loaded, click the “Export Chart” button, and save the chart some place easy to find.  Once it is saved, browse your computer to find the file and open it in “Notepad” (Nopepad++ and Visual Studio both work great for this).  You don’t want to edit this in Word or any other word processing program.  Once the XML is opened, look through the file for the area that says “Series” about in the middle of the file.

You’ll notice there are two “Series” here.  The first is going to show Est. Revenue, the second shows Actual Revenue.  If you go to the rightmost end of these lines you can find the “YAxisType” in the second series.  Simply remove the whole ‘YAxisType=”Secondary”’ section so both series look identical.

Once you’ve done that, save the file, you’ve just successfully edited the XML!  After it’s saved, go back to CRM to the same place as before, and click the “Import Chart” button.  Browse to where you saved the file, select it, click “Open” and click “OK”.  You should get a pop up saying there is a duplicate chart found.  Both “Replace” and “Keep Both”, but for this I’m just going to “Replace” the original chart, as we won’t need it after this one is in place.  If you’ve done everything else correctly to this point it should tell you the chart was successfully imported, hooray!  Open up the new chart and you should see it now show both series using the same exact scale on the left.

When you’re working with more than two series, the second series from the top is going to use the second axis, and all other series (1, 3, 4, 5) use the first series on the left.  You can do the same kind of XML edit to make all series use the same axis.  Alternatively, the opposite changes are possible as well by adding the ‘YAxisType=”Secondary”’ to the end of other series.