XY (Scatter) chart issues.

[saydan]

I was wondering if anyone else has faced this problem and has come up with a solution.

I created a XY Scatter chart in Excel 97 and the X axis is the date, and the Y is the temperature. The min/max for the X axis is set to auto select but the Y min is 1/1/1979 and the max is 1/1/2003. The major unit is 730.5 and the minor unit is 365.25. This should display everyother year on the X axis, but instead it shows 79,80,83,84, and so on. Is there away around this problem but by still us the same date values?
Thanks,
dan...

 

[Steve Hartman]

Let's assume your dates are in column A starting in cell 1. In a free column, cell 1, put=YEAR(A1) and copy down the column.
Use this column for your X axis and set major unit to 2 and minor unit to 1. This should give you what you want to do

 

[saydan]

I must thank you for your help, We've been fighting with this for a while and with your suggestion it seems to all be fine now. We've changed the dates from 1/1/1979 to 1/5/1979 and then it will plot ok. When it gets to the problem years it will go to 1/4/1979.
Thanks again!
dan...

 

[Mark W.]

Whoa!! Do I understand that all this time you're graphing only 1 value per year and that you're choosing an arbitrary date to represent each year? If that's the case an XY Chart isn't needed at all!!! It was my understanding that you had daily values that you wanted to plot on a X-axis with 2 year increments and still preserve the distribution (scatter) of the Y values. If that's not the case you should be using a Line chart (with the line attribute set to 'none') where the X-axis values are categories. Steve's recommendation of mapping daily values to a year value won't preserve the true distribution of daily values. The values will be "stacked" over each year label rather than scattered among the years.
This message was edited by Mark W. on 2002-02-21 16:43

 

[Steve Hartman]

I agree that an XY scatter plot is not the best choice for this data, but at least there is a way to do what he wanted.