Hi Kate -

The series limit is an old one, one of the 2^n-1 limits from the old days of
tight RAM, small hard drives, and slow processors. It still makes sense in
most cases.

I have an alternate way to generate this kind of chart. Use an XY chart. For
X use whatever is the value along your horizontal axis. For Y use 1 through
8, the stage number. Use no marker for the points. Instead use Y axis error
bars with a small value: try 0.25 and adjust it until you like it.

You can even get the entire chart in a single XY series if you want, or one
series per stage, or however you want to handle it. But you're no longer
throwing away one series per plotted point (or per small number of points).

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


"katesune" wrote in message
...
Is there any reasonable workaround for including more than 255 data series
in
an Excel chart? Ideally, I need to be able to show over 1000 data series
in
a chart.

Now, I know that you might question the legibility of a chart with that
many
data series, so here is a chart with 255 data series:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/d...from-excel.gif

This chart shows time series data for a person working on a problem and
the
problem-solving stages they engage in during the process. It's basically
8
parallel timelines. I have written a macro that generates the timeline by
using essentially floating columns. However, this requires a large number
of
data series to display the entire timeline... hence my question.

Altogether, the choice of 255 series seems arbitrary. While having an
upper
limit theoretically prevents people from making bad charts, I've seen
plenty
of bad charts with only 5 series.

kate