Chart Axis

[Keith Marceau]

After upgrading to Office 2000, the X axis labels in our
line charts overlap each other and create a big black
blob. Everything looks fine in Excel 97 and have
identical settings when I open the file in 2000. I think
that if I could change the scale tab it would look correct
in 2000 but the fields are inactive. I get the same
results in Excel 2003. Any idea what I can do to correct
this?

 

[DataMan]

I went for about 2 years with this problem and even Microsoft would not
help. They changed something between 97 and 200x and said that they
left that function out.

I have found a work around here on this tip forum.

2 different charts will work but both involve adding the date in one
column and time in the other column together in an inserted column.

Say your date is in column A and your time is in column B. Insert a
column C and in this column sum A and B. Make sure the format is
correct in all of the columns and no text characters exist in column A
or B. The reason I say this is that I found out that there were space
chacters in my time data that I never had a problem with until I
started this data sum. 97 just graphed the two and knew what it meant.
So much for upgrades huh.

Now build a line chart with column C being your X category axis and the
rest of your data being on the Y axis. It will look strange at first
but don't panic. Either while building the chart or after, go to the
"Axis" tab of "Chart Options" and change the radio buttton under
"Cateogory (X) Axis" from Automatic to Category. Now it should look
better.

You can also you a XY scatter chart but it does some funky stuff with
your timeline. The one above is a lot eaiser to work with.

 

[Tushar Mehta]

I don't know who you were giving this advice to, but it is bad advice.
In a Line chart, specifying that the category axis is of type category
means that all data points are equally spaced along the x dimension.
So, 1/1/03 00:00, 1/1/03 01:00 and 1/1/03 05:00 will be the same
distance apart.

The *only* way I know of having XL treat time as a non-category entity
is to use a XY Scatter graph. Alternatively, to simulate the correct
seperation in a Line (or Column or Bar) chart, space the data with lots
of empty dummy entries.

Posted directly from Usenet newsgroup. For more see the 'Outlook
Express and Newsgroup' tutorial on my web site.

--
Regards,

Tushar Mehta, MS MVP -- Excel
www.tushar-mehta.com
Excel, PowerPoint, and VBA add-ins, tutorials
Custom MS Office productivity solutions