View Single Post
  #1   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
Judi Judi is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 54
Default Line chart with negative numbers - X-axis problem

Actually, no, I'm not sure. It's not doing what I want at all. I'm slightly
frustrated, actually :)

My data on my spreadsheet looks like this:
October November December
January February
Category 1 14,000.37 18,000 20,000
Category 2
Category 3
Category 4 -275,000 -10,000
Category 5

and the dollar amounts are filled in throughout the table.

What I'm getting is a chart that shows the months along the X-axis (and in
the middle of the chart, as I discussed before), and the categories along the
Y-axis. That has not yet proved to be the most successful way to visually
"explain" my numbers. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to show this
information is, so it's visually helpful. For example, I'm looking for a
spike in numbers in November (for several categories). I want that to pop
out visually, so that my managers see that immediately upon looking at the
chart.

Can you help?

Thank you!

~Judi

"Jerry W. Lewis" wrote:

Double click on the y-axis and on the scale tab, specify the y value where
you want the x-axis to cross.

Are you sure that you want a "Line" chart and not an "XY (Scatter)" chart?
The only difference between them is that the x-axis on a "Line" chart is
presumed to be categories instead of an arithmetic scale. If you think your
x values are numbers and they are not equally spaced, then a "Line" chart
will distort your graph by making them appear to be equally spaced. Even if
they are equally spaced, if you try to fit a trendline, the fitted parameters
from a "Line" chart will be calculated assuming that your x values were
1,2,3,... regardless of what you think the x values are.

Jerry

"Judi" wrote:

There's probably a really easy solution to this, but I've made a chart out of
a spreadsheet that's got negative numbers in it. My X-axis labels are in the
middle of the chart now, and I'd like them to be along the bottom.

Can you help?

~Judi