Pareto lines on bar charts - an Excel fudge

I found this aberration the other day on 148apps.biz. It's a pie chart of showing the categories of the apps available on the Apple website. I won't labor on why it fails, but the multiple slices, oblique view, lack of color blind sensitivity, and 0% pie pieces add up to a awkward chart.

While not 148apps fault, the choice of categories that Apple has made available makes the chart less usable - some should clearly be subcategories - strategy for example is probably a game category. 

A bar chart is a better choice - even better are bars with a pareto line showing that the top five categories account for x% of the total apps available. You can add a pareto line to a column chart relatively easily - add a new series (the cumulative percentages that you've calculated) to the column chart, change the chart type of just this series to line chart, and place it on a secondary axis.

However, you can't do this with bar charts as the line can't be plotted on a secondary axis when it's in this orientation.

Instead you are doomed to fudging a solution - plotting an XY line with the X coordinates matching the cumulative percentage, scaled up to match the current full scale (20,000), and Y coordinates that correspond to the position of the category labels. These Y coordinates are quite easy to calculate - if I have 20 labels, the Y position of the first point will be 19.5, the next 18.5, and so on. Copy and paste the new XY data in, change the chart type of this series to XY,  and ensure that you don't have to swap the X and Y column. Excel will add the data with a new Y axis - edit this and set the maximum value to the number of categories (20) - this  lines everything up, then delete this extra axis. I had to add the 0%, 25%, 50%, etc. to the bottom as text boxes.

Download the Excel file here. And yes, those are miniature iPhones making up the bars..