Visually great charts are always welcome in my inbox, so when a friend forwarded a link to me showing a tutorial on how to create a double lollipop chart, I was intrigued.  A double lollipop chart (not to confused with a cherry chart – although it looks very similar) is used to compare target vs actual performance – it’s another way of comparing one line against another.

The picture above is from the post I was sent, which had a great tutorial created by SteveEqualsTrue from exceldashboardtemplates.com and a download which recreated the chart (above) seen in the Wall Street Journal.  Since I didn’t want to recreate the WSJ chart and actually wanted the chart to have conditional formatting, I created my own version.

You can download the sample chart here.

 Step 1: Set up your data

To begin with you should have a data table with one column showing the actual…