Charting and analyzing Times' times data for trends

[Johnny]

Hello, all,

I have created a spreadsheet in Excel 2000 that tracks the amount of
time it has taken me on various dates to finish the New York Time
crossword puzzle, and now I'm being asked to analyze that information
for trends.

The XLS file can be found at
http://barelybad.com/xwd_times_may04_2005_138.xls. Only rows 10:426
matter.

Is it possible to chart all seven days' worth of data (dates on the
x-axis and times on the y-axis) on one chart? I would have thought so,
but I can't figure it out.

Also, you'll see from where I tried to chart the Monday times that the
result is ugly and unhelpful; is there some way to smooth out the X-axis
data so they show a general trend rather that every single point?

The chart is also misleading in that dates for which I did not record a
time at all show up as time 00:00:00. Nothing I've tried fixes this
crucial problem.

Also, is there a numerical way to express the rate of change of times
from the beginning date to the ending date for, say, just the Friday
puzzles? I can't seem to get the SLOPE function to make sense, and I'm
not sure that's what I want anyway. What function (or functions) would
you use, and exactly how would you use it (making sure the blank cells
don't count as zero!), to express whether I've gotten stupider since
April 28, 1997?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

--Johnny
barelybad.com
johnnyg aatssiign B_A_R_E_L_Y_B_A_D d.o.t c-o-m

 

[Johnny]

===============
[A few minutes later]

Re-hello, all,

Using Outlook Express I just read my own original post below, and when I
click on the URL for the spreadsheet it opens Internet Explorer just
fine, but then it never opens the Excel file. When I copy and paste the
address into IE it opens Excel as I would expect. Any ideas why
clicking fails? Sorry if I'm being ignorant here.

--Johnny
===============