title: How do I make a burn down chart in Excel?
body: <p>I have several books I want to finish reading by a certain date.  I'd like to track my progress completing these books, so I decided to try making a simple burn down chart.  The chart should be able to tell me at a glance whether I'm on track to completing my books by the target date.</p>
  
  <p>I decided to try using Excel 2007 to create a graph showing the burn down.  But I'm having some difficulty getting the graphs to work well, so I figured I could ask.</p>
  
  <p>I have the following cells for the target date and pages read, showing when I started (today) and when the target date is (early November):</p>
  
  <pre><code>Date         Pages remaining
  7/19/2009    7350
  11/3/2009    0
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And here's how I plan to fill in my actual data.  Additional rows will be added at my leisure:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Date            Pages remaining
  7/19/2009       7350
  7/21/2009       7300
  7/22/2009       7100
  7/29/2009       7070
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can use Excel to get either of these bits of data onto a <em>single</em> line graph.  I'm just having difficulty <em>combining</em> them.</p>
  
  <p>I want to get both sets of data on the same chart, with Pages on the Y axis and Date on X axis.  With such a graph, I could easily see my actual read velocity relative to target read velocity, and determine how well on track I am toward my goal.</p>
  
  <p>I have tried several things, but none of the help documentation seems to point me in the right direction. I get the feeling this might be a bit easier if all my data was in 1 big block of data points rather than in 2 separate blocks of data. But since I only <em>have</em> 2 data points for the target data (start and finish), I can't imagine I should need to make up fake data to fill the holes.</p>
  
  <h2>The question...</h2>
  
  <p>How can I put these two sets of data into a single chart?</p>
  
  <p><em>Alternatively,</em></p>
  
  <p>What's a better way to plot my progress toward a goal over time?</p>