This might do it. Instead of what Excel considers meaningless text (no
humanities jokes!), enter your ages as fractional years. 1;8 means 1
year + 8 months, or 1 8/12 years (1.6666667). Format the column with a
custom number format of

# 0/12

and your column of ages looks like this:

1 8/12
1 9/12
1 10/12
1 11/12
2 0/12
2 0/12
3 0/12

Notice that two of your ages are converted to whole years (0/12) from an
age of Y + 12 months. In fact, a custom number format of

#";"0/12

retains the semicolon:

1;8/12
1;9/12
1;10/12
1;11/12
2;0/12
2;0/12
3;0/12

though you are stuck with the /12 if you want the number to remain
numeric. Just use this as your age variable and the last column as the
value to plot against it.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______

wrote:

Hi All,

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to get excel to chart some
data of in the format of year;month to represent an age. This is a
common convention in the humanities, but I can't make excel do it.

Bascially, I want to plot data like this on an X-Y scatter plot

1;8 40
1;9 50
1;10 40
1;11 33
1;12 44
2;00 21
2;12 64

Thanks for any help you could give!