Make Your Excel Area Charts Beautiful!
Excel is one of my favorite applications. So I was a little disappointed when Excel didn’t quite behave as I had expected when I created an Excel Area Chart.
Step One
Here is some sample data that I’ve loaded up in Excel to illustrate the point.
Step Two
Select the Chart Wizard and pick any of the Area Charts. For this example I’ve picked a 100% Stacked Area Chart.
Step Three
We can see already from the preview that the Area Chart shows a “drop off” from 2007 to 2008. That’s not quite what I had expected.
Step Four
Note the X-Axis setting – we’ll revisit this shortly.
Step Five
We need to change the X-Axis to a date and insert a duplicate entry for the last bits of data.
Step Six
By applying a custom format to the range of cells, we’ve changed the data back to the original four digit year. However, Excel clearly understands the data it’s working with.
Step Seven
We now need to go back and edit some of the Chart Options. Notice in the screenshot below the duplicate entry is shown.
Step Eight
By changing the X-Axis to time-scale that ugly drop-off is removed.
Step Nine
Now admire the finished product – sans ugly drop off 
I only needed step 5, that’s the one that does the trick. Thanks man!
I know this is an old thread, but I just ran across it today. As long as the axis is time scale (or date as they call it now) you can put your extra line of zero data anywhere in the data list. I dropped it at the bottom of a table and the area graph immediately looked pretty!