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Saturday, May 21, 2016

Excel 2013 Has Made Line Graphs Too Hard

It used to be back in Excel 2007, that if you selected two columns: years in one, and numbers in the other that inserting a line chart would plot the numbers against the years.  Now, it assumes both are data.  I can't find an explanation of how to do this.  Am I only the only person who wants to plot yearly data?
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5 comments:

  1. Jerry The GeekMay 21, 2016 at 8:25 PM

    Perhaps you're the only one who is still sufficiently productive to care ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Douglas2May 23, 2016 at 11:52 AM

    I discovered the same thing when the St. Louis fed "FRED" wouldn't plot two datasets together that I wanted to see in the same graph.

    I thought "simple, I can do this in Excel in a few minutes" but could not work out how to make a column of labels just be labels and not "data points".

    It ended up that the data told me that the novel thing I had read was in fact correct, but without a useable graph that I could show anyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mark_TMay 23, 2016 at 1:33 PM

    1. Select the 2nd column (the one that contains the values for each year).
    2. Insert/chart/line chart.
    3. Right-click on the line series, then Select Data...
    4. Edit the Horizontal Axis Labels.
    5. Select the range for the Axis labels (the values in the 1st column that contain the years).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mark_TMay 23, 2016 at 1:33 PM

    1. Select the 2nd column (the one that contains the values for each year).
    2. Insert/chart/line chart.
    3. Right-click on the line series, then Select Data...
    4. Edit the Horizontal Axis Labels.
    5. Select the range for the Axis labels (the values in the 1st column that contain the years).

    ReplyDelete
  5. Clayton CramerMay 23, 2016 at 10:05 PM

    Mark_T: perfect. Why did they make what used to be intuitive so hard?

    ReplyDelete