Mary,

As far as I recall, the scatter graph always uses a value axis, which should
always result in graph points placed proportional to the date. Rather than
write (another) dissertation on Excel charts and date-time formatting, I'll
ask this. Are you certain it's a scatter chart? If you're not, right click
it, and choose "chart type." The chart type will be highlighted. We'll go
from there.

--
Earl Kiosterud
www.smokeylake.com
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"Mary Walker" wrote in message
...
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?