I find area charts quite tricky to read. Stacked bar chart with bars at each month and no space between the bars might be easier to read. Anyway ... I assume you have an age variable in months (let us call it age) and a variable that codes for milk as (e.g. 1 = EBF, 2 = BF with water, 2 = BF with other milk, 3 = Other milk, 54 = No milk) - let us call it milk). If you do not have such a variable (e.g. you may have one Y/N variable per milk type) then you can make a new variable from existing variables. Here I use R (it is what I know) but the process should be the same in STATA or SPSS or Epi-Info or SAS or ... Make a table of age (rows) by milk (columns) and plot the table: plot(table(age, milk)) or (the other way round and plotting counts): barplot(table(milk, age)) You can just take the able of age (rows) by milk (columns), import it into Excel (you may be able to copy and paste), and plot the data as a stacked bar chart (data in rows). Most spreadsheet packages will plot so all categories sum to 100% or plot counts. Is this any help?

I agree that they are hard to read - but it seems a standard way to present this data. This was really helpful Mark thank-you! I now have an area graph :)

I always have doubt when producing this kind of graphics. As the graph is represented in 100% for each age group, I assumed that each categories are exclusive. This seems to be confirmed by mark's reply "milk variable could have only one option per children (=line)?" Considering that there is 6 categories : 1. Exclusive BF 2. BF + Water 3. BF + Milk/Infant Formula 4. BF + Other liquid 5. BF + Soft, Semi-solid food 6. No BF If categories are exclusive, for example, a child of 9 month which have consumed during the day/night before the survey: BF + Water + Semi-solid food will be excluded from the analysis. In this way, most of the cases would be excluded from the graph. If categories are inclusive (a child could be present in different group at the same time), it's make no sens to present this graph as percentage/age group. Does anyone could clarify the logic of this type of 'IYCF practices standard graph'? Thanks