Radar Charts

[Curly Bloke]

Is it possible to control the position of the first point on a radar chart? I
need to essentially rotait the whole chart so that the first data point is
offset, rather than at 12o'clock.

Thanks

 

[Andy Pope]

Hi,

The radar chart does not allow this.

You can of course create your own radar looking chart using a XY Scatter,
multiple series to draw axes, gridlines and datalines plus some maths
knowledge in order to calculate all the positions.

Cheers
Andy

 

[Del Cotter]

Is it possible to control the position of the first point on a radar chart? I
need to essentially rotait the whole chart so that the first data point is
offset, rather than at 12o'clock.

I wanted to do this recently for a polar area graph (or "Nightingale
rose") I was designing, and I couldn't see any way to do it.

Your only option seems to be to move data between the top and bottom of
your chart ranges until the twelve o'clock position looks right.

 

[Jon Peltier]

Does Stephen Bullen's polar plot help?

http://www.oaltd.co.uk/Excel/SBXLPage.asp#Charting - FunChrt6.zip

- Jon

 

[Del Cotter]

Does Stephen Bullen's polar plot help?

That's an XY Chart, so I don't think it gets us any further along: what
we're looking for is the equivalent of the "Angle of first slice"
spinner in Pie Charts, and the XY Chart type is as devoid of such
built-in controls as the Radar Chart.

I'm happy enough to just move the data if it's necessary, but if Curly
needs a more dynamic solution, I'd suggest something involving INDEX and
MOD to cycle round the numbers:

=INDEX(original_range,1+MOD(cell-offset,COUNTA(original_range)))

where "offset" is a number you type into another cell. Every time you
advance "offset" by one, you advance the data one place clockwise around
the radar chart. "cell" is one of a range of numbers starting from 0 and
ending at one less than the count of rows in the original range. So...

offset 0

orig cells formula
a 0 a
b 1 b
c 2 c
d 3 d

but...

offset 1

orig cells formula
a 0 d
b 1 a
c 2 b
d 3 c

....and so on. You see why I just did it by hand instead

Oh, one other thing. This just moves the radar chart points round by one
place, it doesn't move the twelve o'clock position, so it still doesn't
have the precision of the Pie Chart angle control.

 

[Jon Peltier]

Del -

I was referring more to your Nightingale Rose project. I don't know about
the needs of the OP. A lot of applications that people use radar charts for
are better suited to parallel coordinates charts. Coincidentally, I just
wrote a tutorial on these:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ParallelCoord.html

- Jon