How to Create a Thermometer Chart in Google Slides (The Stacked Bar Hack)

You’re running a fundraising drive, or maybe your team is pushing hard for a Q4 sales target.

You need to show progress to the rest of the company. A standard pie chart is boring. A text bullet point is instantly forgotten.

What you really want is that classic, satisfying "thermometer" filling up toward a red line.

But if you’ve ever tried to build one natively in Google Slides, you already know the bad news. There is no "Thermometer Chart" button.

Most people end up drawing a bunch of rectangle shapes and manually dragging them wider every week. It’s tedious, and it never looks quite perfectly aligned.

Today, I’m going to show you a much better way to handle goal tracking. We are going to use a simple "Stacked Bar Hack."

The Concept Behind the Hack

A thermometer is really just a single, thick bar split into two parts:

1. What you’ve achieved so far.
2. What is left to reach the goal.

By using a Stacked Column or Stacked Bar chart, and limiting it to just a single column of data, you instantly get the "gauge" effect.

Instead of fighting with Google’s native chart editor—which often forces unwanted gridlines and weird spacing—I use ExtraChart. It’s an add-on that sits right inside Google Slides and gives you way more control over how your charts actually look.

Step 1: Set Up the Data

First, open ExtraChart from your Extensions menu.

When the sidebar loads, you’ll see a grid of chart options. Click on the Stacked Bar Chart icon.

The editor will pop up. Head over to the Data tab.

To make this work, you only need one category (let's call it "Q4 Goal") and two data series.

• Series 1: "Achieved" (e.g., $75,000)
• Series 2: "Remaining" (e.g., $25,000)

Because ExtraChart updates in real-time, you’ll instantly see a single, stacked bar appear in the preview window on the left.

Step 2: Color It Like a Thermometer

Now for the fun part. We need to style it so it actually looks like a goal tracker.

Click over to the Settings tab.

Find the color palette manager. Change your "Achieved" series to a bold, striking color—like a bright red or a deep green.

Then, take your "Remaining" series and change it to a very light, washed-out gray. Or, if your background allows it, make it nearly transparent with a light border. Suddenly, the illusion is complete. The gray acts as the "empty tube" of the thermometer, and the red is the liquid filling it up.

Step 3: Tweak the Spacing

Native presentation tools often make single-bar charts awkwardly skinny or push them weirdly to one side of the slide.

You want your thermometer to be thick and commanding.

In ExtraChart's layout parameters, you have total control over spacing and padding. You can widen the bar, remove the X and Y axis lines completely for a cleaner look, and drop the legend to the bottom.

Here is a quick look at how dialing in those spacing controls works inside the editor:

Once it looks perfect, click "Create."

ExtraChart drops the high-resolution image right onto your active slide. The best part? Next week, when you hit $85,000, just select the chart, re-open ExtraChart, and type in the new number. You don't have to redraw anything.

A Pro-Tip: The "Corporate Thermometer"

Thermometer charts are great for charity drives and casual team meetings.

But what if you are presenting to the board? A giant red thermometer might look a bit too playful.

If you want the exact same "goal tracking" functionality but with a highly professional, data-dense look, try a Bullet Chart.

Bullet charts were literally invented to solve this exact problem. They show progress against a target, plus qualitative ranges (like "poor," "satisfactory," and "excellent"), all in a sleek horizontal footprint.

ExtraChart includes a dedicated Bullet Chart generator right in the sidebar. It’s perfect for KPI dashboards where you need to track five or six different targets on a single slide without cluttering the screen.

Stop manually dragging shapes to show your team's progress. Try the stacked bar hack on your next presentation, and watch how much time you save.