I work for an environmental engineering firm, and commonly create time-series
and other scatterplots of numerical data using Excel.

In Excel 2003, I could format a time-series scatterplot axis minimum and
maximum easily by typing in the dates in short date format. Not so in 2007 -
it refuses to accept dates in anything but "days elapsed since 01/01/1900"
format.

Is there a workaround for this? Why was it changed? It was quite useful.

Overall, I'm pretty unhappy with the new Excel. It seems to have acquired a
lot more layers of very questionable usefulness. Many of the new features in
the graphing (charting) function would be a lot more at home in Powerpoint
than in a bread-and-butter engineering program like Excel. Most of the
changes seem to be of the "because we can" variety rather than having been
driven by any real need or user feedback.

Thanks,

JRS