"Jon Peltier" wrote:


"Warp4Dennis" wrote in message
...
Does the file even have a suffix? Does Windows do this for all of your
files? To undo it (hope I'm not repeating what you've already done) in
Windows Explorer's Tools menu, choose Folder Options, click on the View
tab,
and uncheck the Advanced Setting box for Hide Extensions For Known File
Types.

Yes, the file has the .xls suffix.
All the files that I have used up to this time had no suffix would you
believe, and they were CSV files.
My customer has changed Companies and they are delivering their data as
.xls
files. Looking at a .xls file there seems to be an awful lot of useless
info in the file that is not needed to do a Line Chart.
What's the best way to get the data I need for the Line Chart from the
.xls
file?

You can just select the range you want and make the chart (ignoring other
cells). Or you could copy the cells you want into a new workbook.

When you do a Save As in Excel, what file type is offered? Excel should
start with the same type as the original file, so opening a CSV file
would
make Excel offer to save it as another CSV file.

That's my problem. The file is .xls and I don't know how to work with
this
type of file. And MS doesn't provide any information that is helpful to
me
in solving my problem. As a matter of fact, there is very little info on
Charts and Graphs in Excel. It seems to be an area where very little can
go
wrong.
I know how I want the Line Chart to be, but hinged if I know how to get
the
s/w to do the job.
I suspect that MS Excel may not installed properly, which may be a
contributing factor. The reason I suspect that is because the Excel
"Button"
is not present
before the "File", "Edit" and "View" buttons.

If in fact Office is incorrectly installed, you should reinstall it first.

The Excel icon appears before the File menu if a workbook is open and
maximized, not if no files are open or if the open files are not maximized
to fill the Excel window.

Put X values in one column and Y values in the next column to the right. If
the X values are truly numerical values that you want to treat according to
these values, you want an XY chart, not a line chart. If the X values are
text labels, you want a Line chart. If the X values are dates, you may want
one or the other, so try both.

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

MS Excel is now at level SP-3. Updating has corrected some problems that I
had to work around.
The Charts Wizard seems to be more predictable.
That is, I only get now one "Series" name insted of 200+ names.
I can now concentrate on putting the proper values in the input boxes with
the correct formulars.
I presume that Excel understands VBA?