I want to track the widget buying history of each customer. I already have
sales data on how many widgets have been purchased by a distinct customer on
a specific date. There are other helpful fields such as geographic region,
customer size, etc. I've already been able to massage the data a bit and use
pivot tables so I can get statistics such as total widgets per region per
quarter, widgets per quarter purchased by new vs. existing customers, etc.

I'm trying to prove or disprove a hypothesis about the data; namely, are
most widget purchases made simultaneously with the initial sale of the first
widget or afterward? I was hoping that by graphing the widget buying history
of a number of customers, this would become more apparent. This is why I
planned to make each customer into its own series so I could graph out the
customer's buying history over time.

I plan on segmenting the customers by geographic region and customer size.
If I still have more than 255 customers per segment then I was simply going
to make each segment smaller by tweaking the customer size categories.

I'm doing this analysis mostly for myself so I can draw some conclusions
about our customers and their buying patterns, so you are correct in saying
that legibility isn't the foremost concern.

Hopefully my questions make more sense! I'm still fairly new to Excel
charting but I'm doing my best to learn as much as I can to get the job done.

"Jon Peltier" wrote:

It depends on what you want to show. As I asked...

Does each customer need its own series? Are you interested in
widgets per day, cumulative widgets, or something else?

Another thing you need is legibility, but your posts don't indicate that
you're too concerned with that.

What you need to think about includes:

* do I understand my client?
- do I understand the data?
- do I understand what they need to learn from the chart?
- do I know how they currently display the data?
* what are my plotted values?
* how do I segment the data?
- what are the categories? dates? parts? customer? something else?
- how do I define my series? customer? part number? classifications of
parts?

- Jon