Del:

We think alike.

If I were redoing Excel's charting tool, I'd drop the XY (Scatter) Chart -
Line Chart terminology. To me, all 2 D charts are XY charts; scatter and
line charts are just special forms of XY charts. How many questions show up
on the Chart forum because users want to have a "line" chart with numeric
values for X and Y.

....Kelly




"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 1 May 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Kelly O'Day said:

While it takes a little patience to master custom axes, once you do you
can
start making Excel do things you never thought possible.

If I was designing a charting module for spreadsheets today, I would make
axes be just another kind of data series, with marker types available for
correct appearance and a chart wizard for worry-free setup by non-expert
users.

This actually mirrors the way I was taught graphing as a child at school:
the "x-axis" was always referred as the line obeying the equation y=0, and
the "y axis" was always called x=0. The idea was to encourage children to
understand that there is nothing special or magic about those parts of
graph space, and especially nothing particularly magic about the origin
point (0,0).

(although it mainly confused and annoyed me at the time because I got the
language mixed up: was x=0 the x axis? :-)

I have had colleagues freak out when they see me do axes that aren't on
the zero line, especially when I do the custom axis trick of not having
the two axes joined at one corner, but each floating free with a gap of
white space. They understand better when I call them "scale bars" and
compare them to the scale bars on a map, with the graph space analogous to
a map area.

--
Del Cotter
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