Chart Wizard in Excel not flexible enough

[Guest]

Why not make Microsoft Graph accessible ffom Excel, for greater flexibility
in graphing information than Chart Wizard allows?

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[Jon Peltier]

Pardon my asking, but are you nuts? MSG is merely Excel's baby brother. The chart
wizard and the rest of the possibilities for charting in Excel greatly exceed MSG's
meager capabilities.

If you really want MSG within Excel, here's how:

Insert menu > Object... > Create New tab, scroll down to Microsoft Graph Chart.

The MSG chart is completely independent of the Excel spreadsheet, BTW, so it won't
even link to any data in the worksheet.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______

 

[Guest]

I stand corrected; can you recommend a comprehensive resource for graphing
using chart Wizard? I need to graph data that includes multiple parameters,
multiple sampling locations over multiple dates. I find Chart Wizard
difficult to use with respect to assigning fields to the x and y axes,
identifying series... Perhaps I need to design my worksheets differently, but
it would be nice to have the flexibility to assign fields freely, without
having to deal with Chart Wizard trying to second guess me.

 

[Jon Peltier]

You can override anything the chart wizard does, but with a few
preliminary steps, you can make the wizard work for you, not the other
way round.

Put your data into lists, meaning contiguous regions, with series in
columns, the first column as the shared X values (if they're shared,
otherwise simply alternate X and Y values as paired columns, with X to
the left), the first row as column headings, and the top left cell
blank. Select the whole range, including top row and left column, then
the chart wizard will use the first row as series names and the first
column as categories. You don't need to be so neat and orderly about it,
but in 99% of the cases, it will save minutes per chart.

If the chart wizard doesn't get the used range the way you want, then on
the Source Data tab of the wizard (step 2) or in the Chart menu > Source
Data dialog, click on the Series tab, and independently assign the name,
X values, and Y values for each series.

MS Chart forces you to use the inflexible data sheet for your data,
which doesn't allow you to chart data from different ranges, to not
chart data from within a range (e.g., omit some columns), to chart data
from different sheets or workbooks. What's in the data sheet is in the
chart, and vice versa.

There are lots of resources on the internet, most of them simplistic and
incomplete. I have a few pages about this on my web site. Start here and
scroll around:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/ChartWizard.html
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/SourceData.html
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/ChartDataRange.html

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______

 

[Guest]

Thank you for the info! I will try your suggestions and check out your pages
for more info. I had looked at a lot of internet sources and, as you noted,
they were simplistic and incomplete.

Michelle