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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Microsoft Excel 2010

I'm impressed.  It used to be that I could select two columns of data in an Excel spreadsheet, click the chart wizard to quickly produce a line chart or bar chart, and if need be, fiddle a bit with the various elements of the chart.  With Excel 2010, it will not let me plot data of the form:

year   rate
1950  5.5
1951  5.6
1952  5.9

It produces a chart like this:


There is no way to tell it (that I can find) to use the year column as the X axis, and the rate column for the Y axis.  I just don't see why Microsoft has to take perfectly working functionality and change it to something that works less well.  This is one of the reasons that I resisted moving to Microsoft Office 2010 as long as I did--they can't leave well enough alone.

8 comments:

  1. Its frustrating that the good companies died to Microsoft's monopolistic tactics.

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  2. You're right. I noticed that too. You had to choose just the second column, which plots it against the series (1, 2, 3 ...), then select data to insert the x-axis. Really annoying.

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  3. Clayton, have you tried the Open Office suite? the word processor fills my minimal needs. I have never used the spreadsheet, but it is a free opensource setup.

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  4. Bog-easy in my 2003 version of Appleworks.

    I pasted the data into a spreadsheet, then clicked "Make Chart", and picked "X-Y Line". It assumes the first line is the X value and the second is the Y value.

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  5. Yes, I use Open Office 3.3, and it works very well. I am just frustrated that Microsoft keeps screwing up their product, making what used to be a pretty easy to use product into one that isn't so easy to use.

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  6. Rich: It was that easy in older versions of Excel, too!

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  7. Dear Mr. Cramer,

    Try putting an apostrophe before each of the years (1950 becomes '1950) and then run the wizard.

    Yours truly,

    ThOR

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  8. How about just choosing an X/Y scatter graph in the "insert" field for the chart?

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