NormD said:
Anyone know if there is a setting for changing the max number of points in a
line graph? I'm guessing the answer is "Tough!" I can't believe that 2007
increased the max rows in the table (from 64K to over 1M!) but still has a
32K limit on points in a line graph!

I'm not familiar with the limit, so apologies if this is a silly
question, but...

Is it a limit of 32K points per chart, or only 32K points per range? If
the latter, then start a new range and format it to look just like the
first range. There'll be no way to tell the difference.

(I'm doing this more and more often these days, for various reasons, not
for the 32K reason, and I find it a useful technique for showing up
patterns. Sometimes what we need to show us a pattern is to *suppress*
information rather than highlight it. Giving the series distinctly
different format appearances just turns the graph into a confusing mess,
while turning them all to identical grey dots or identical grey lines
makes things clearer. )

Okay, I've just tried it in Excel 97, and what the error message says
is:

"The maximum number of data points you can use in a data series
for a 2-D chart is 32,000. If you want to use more than 32,000
data points, you must create two or more series."

Is there some reason why you can't do what the error message suggests?
It was the first thing I thought of.

If you go this route, try to get some value out of the exercise by
making the two series be based on some otherwise invisible difference in
the data. Are you plotting x and y over twenty four hours on a scatter
chart? See what it looks like when the "morning" x and y values are in
blue and the "afternoon" exes and wyes are in grey. (This is the
opposite of what I wrote above, turning a bland grey mess into
multicoloured dots, in the hope of seeing a morning/afternoon difference
in behaviour)

If there are still too many dots for Excel to chart, try culling the
"lazy data" out. Are there three consecutive values like this?

07/02/2007 09:52:46 10000.00001
07/02/2007 09:52:47 10000.00002
07/02/2007 09:52:48 10000.00003

Is that middle value really contributing? If not, write a formula to
lose it, or aggregate two of them into an average, and just plot the
sudden movements. Writers of programs that simulate planetary orbits
typically do this sort of thing to conserve scarce computing resources:
they concentrate their simulations on the tricky close encounter
situations and skip through the boring parts.

Or you could use the "dynamic range" techniques mentioned on this
newsgroup, that exploit named ranges and the OFFSET() function, to build
yourself a chart that looks at no more than 32000 points at once, but
that you can "pan" with a spinner form control to scroll through your
data set looking for interesting events.

--
Del Cotter
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