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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