Creating Charts - Avoiding autofill of dates, adjusting width, and stopping overlap

[sheranic]

I was at work the other day, coincidentally creating a combo column/line chart on the migration from Office 2010 to 2013, and had some issues creating a chart that looked decent. This was on Win 7 x64 Enterprise with Office 2013 Pro Plus x86.

Example data below

Version	2010	2013	None	Total
4-Sep	312	5767	130	6209
11-Sep	213	5862	150	6225
18-Sep	124	5992	150	6266
25-Sep	23	6093	152	6268

<colgroup><col width="64" style="width:48pt" span="5"> <tbody>
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I had three problems

1. The columns were all very skinny with a lot of white space between the dates. Tweaking the Series Overlap and Gap Width did not correct this.
2. Excel autofilled all of the days between 9/4 to 9/11 and 9/11 to 9/18, etc. further exacerbating the issue above.
3. When I plot 2013 and Total (line) on a secondary axis, leaving 2010 and None on the primary, the 2013 column overlaps the 2010 and None columns.


I just tried to repeat these issues on my home system (Win 10 Home x64 with Office Pro Plus 2013 x64), but 1. and 2. were not issues on my personal laptop.

I also found a work around that has you add 2 empty columns between the data columns to act as "Padding" so the columns you want to see overlaps the blank data. Then just delete the legend entries for the padding columns and tweak the Overlap and Gap settings for the series. The table would then look like below. It works, but seems like that can't be the REAL solution.

Version	2010	padding 2010	Padding 2013	2013	Padding 2013	Padding None	None	Total
4-Sep	312			5767			130	6209
11-Sep	213			5862			150	6225
18-Sep	124			5992			150	6266
25-Sep	23			6093			152	6268

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