Column Chart, showing planned and actual projects & how many are completed in each month

Hello everyone,

I am trying to track projects with a simple chart. The chart needs to have the months at the bottom Jan-Dec, and a count would be your vertical to see the number of project completed that month (either planned or actual). Each month would have two columns planned month (column E) and Actual (column D). The goal is to show the projects planned per month with the dates equaling a number (1=Jan, 2=Feb etc). With my current data jan would have zero planned and three actual, feb would have zero planned and zero actual, march would have seven planned and zero actual. Is it possible to add information to the actual column as they are completed and be automatically updated? I really appreiciate the help.

I made my own chart of how I want the final product to look like. Just don't understand how to make it happen in excel.
Thank you,
BB

Not sure if I would use a count function to add all of the planned months to form the planned month column?

A large part of charting in spreadsheets is getting the data summarized and arranged in the spreadsheet. Usually, if you do this part well, the chart itself is easy to create. Assuming I understand what you want, I would:

1) enter month numbers in a convenient column (for my purposes, I chose I26:I37 to enter 1 to 12). I entered "actual" and "planned" into J25:K25. This will become the data range for my chart.
2) In the main body of this range, I use a COUNTIFS() function in J26 (help file: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...c-aa8c2a866842 ) to count the numbers from the source data. =COUNTIFS(D$2:D$510,$I26) Note the mix of relative and absolute references for easy copying. Also note that I set the range to be much larger than the current data set to allow you to add data to the source (another strategy is to use a structured table for the source range which will automatically size as you add data.) Copy/paste/fill this formula into J26:K37.
3) Now I can select I25:K37 -> insert column chart.
4) Excel will "guess" what I want for data ranges. If Excel guesses correctly (I expect it should with this layout), then I can start formatting chart elements as desired. If not, I pull up the select source data dialog and fix Excel's incorrect guesses.

That seems like it should work for you, if I understand correctly.