I have an idea for a chart type that I can almost construct in Excel,
except that I am frustrated by the fact that Excel columns have only a
single option for borders: all the way around, or none.

It would be effectively a graph of interval Y axis against category X
axis, where there are many data points per category. This would normally
be shown as something like a box and whisker chart, perhaps with
outliers shown individually, but I want to show *all* points in the
distribution individually. I'm calling this a "comb graph", where the
data points are the teeth of the comb:

http://www.branta.demon.co.uk/excel/comb071204a.xls

This one's constructed using 255 series, formatted identically as
columns with no area and a red border.

Can anyone suggest a macro to convert the borders around every column in
a column chart series into a user-specified *partial* border, e.g.
borders on top only, or on top and on the left side only, similar to the
way the borders of spreadsheet cells can be specified? I imagine this
would work by turning off the borders and replacing them with lines
drawn by macro (question: would this method result in lines that did not
print in the correct place, as in the Autoshapes problem?)

I say I can't construct this in Excel, but what I mean is I can't easily
do it using the "Column Chart" type only. The effect is reproducible by
constructing a scatter chart using the same data (and much more
elegantly, due to not having to use 255 "series" each with only one data
point).

But I would like to be able to show this to people who have data coming
from Microsoft Access in this table form, and who do not have the skills
to make a complex chart, but are able to make a column chart. Their
final step would be to run the macro which would replace the column
borders with the fancy borders.

Alternatively, perhaps I *could* arrange for it to be constructed as a
scatter graph, but via helper series which are provided wrapped in a
point-and-click package that turn a data set looking like the one in the
spreadsheet into a series fit for graphing (note that it's not quite as
bad as I portray it: some rows actually do have data in more than one
column).

--
Del Cotter
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