On Wed, 2 May 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Kelly O'Day said:
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.

Yes, there is an important difference between the Scatter chart and the
Line chart, but it's a difference whose value should not be held in the
"Chart type" field, but in the "Axis type" field. The Format Axis
dialogue box should offer the types "Nominal", "Ordinal", and "Interval"
as named by S. S. Stevens in the 1940s.

"Nominal" is like Excel's "Category"

"Ordinal" is like Excel's "Time-scale" (and therein lies an interesting
bug/feature/property that's the key to a favourite trick of mine for
quick and dirty step charts)

"Interval" is the scale type Excel calls "Category" when the chart type
is Scatter. But the chart type is an inappropriate way of controlling
the difference, a bad early design choice by Microsoft that's now frozen
in.

--
Del Cotter
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