How do I remove series

[Guest]

I teach seniors the fundamentals of Excel when I came upon a problem. There
are two rows and four columns of data shown in an example problem for the
students to work on as follows:
2001 2002 2003 2004
$100,000.00 $123,030.00 $133,500.00 $154,200.00

The students were supposed to select both rows and columns and click on the
graph icon on the toolbar.
The final result was supposed to show as a graph with the X axis showing the
dollar figure and the Y axis showing the year. Instead, some of them were
showing series numbers on the X axis instead of the years. I think that they
used the edit/fill/series menu option instead of the graph. (Go figure). My
problem is, how do I restore the original data without the series option
being copied. I have tried deleting, entering the data manually, opening
another spreadsheet and pasting the same data onto a clean sheet but the
series follows. I even replaced the practice workbook with the original
workbook but still the problem follows. I know that you can manually correct
the problem through a series of steps when creating the graph, but I need to
know how to remove the series and restore to the original state. In other
words, I want the students to select the cells, click on the graph icon on
the toolbar, and give them the results of dollars on the Y axis and years on
the X axis instead of dollars on the Y axis and series numbers on the X axis.
I am obviously not an expert in Excel but I need some help please.

 

[Gord Dibben]

Have you tried right-click on the chart and "source data" and changing it from
columns to rows or vice versa?


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

 

[www.exciter.gr: Custom Excel Applications!]

Ok this is a tricky one:
because years are numbers, excel interprets the years as another
series of data.

To correct this, you need to convert the years values to text. But
just formatting the cells as text will not correct this. Actually
there is no need to format cells as text.

You need to actually input the years as text: for example, instead of
typing 2001, you need to type '2001. The symbol (') will not be
visible and excel will interpret the years as text strings. This way
it will recognise these cells as x-axis values and will always return
a correct chart.

This is the easy way. The most proper way is to type 1/1/2001 instead
of just 2001.....to 1/1/2004 instead of 2004.
Then select cells and format using custom format like YYYY. The chart
will always be correct.

Hope this helps

Best