"Ron Rosenfeld" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 08:34:23 +0100, "Mary Walker" wrote:

I'm sure this question has been asked before but I have never been able to
find a satisfactory answer - I have tired everything and I am beginning to
think it cannot be done and it may be a bug(or feature) of excel. I am
using
Microsoft Excel 2002.

I have been keeping an excel spreadsheet to record my weight loss/gain
i.e.
two main columns: "date", "pounds". The date column is formatted as
"date"
and the pounds column is formatted as "number". My records go back for
over
3 years and the entries are not regular; for example in 2004 I went
through
a stage of recording my weight most days but in 2005 there is about a 6
month gap where I do not make any entries at all. I have used the
scatter
graph to try and display my weight fluctuation over time but the problem
is
that the the x-scale (date) axis 2004 readings take up over half the axis
because there are more entries for 2004 than for 2005/06. i.e. the date
axis
is not scaling properly.

I have noticed that on smaller graphs (for example only 10 entries of date
against pounds) the results display as expected and the time is to scale,
but when you get to larger graph (like mine) I feel as if Excel is not
able
to recognise dates as numbers but only as discrete entries. So when I
first
started to use Excel for these purposes, and there were only a small
number
of entries, the graph did actually display the date axis to the correct
scale. But not any more ^_^

So, is this a known bug/feature of Excel and/or is there an easy way round
it?


Excel should be scaling the dates at some regular date interval. Although
with
a line graph, you have the option of choosing a "time interval", even with
a
scatter graph, the axis should be scaled at some fixed number of days.

I suspect a problem with your data. Possibly your "dates" are not really
Excel
dates. If you select a cell and change the format to "General", what
happens
to the contents of that cell?

Excel stores dates as a serial number with 1 = 1/1/1900 or 1/1/1904. If
you
format a date cell as general, you should see a value of around 38,000.
If you
do not, then your values in your date column are not really dates.
--ron

Spot on ... you've fixed it :-) I'd been curious about this for ages - I
just highlighted all the date cells and changed them all to general, as you
said - oddly enough all the values changed to 38000 (ish) apart from one
curious cell which remained as 11/12/05 - the format of this single cell
must have thrown out all the data - don't know how/why it was different from
the others but I just re-entered that cell as a new date and now everything
works as expected. I won't make that mistake again :-)

Many thanks.