Thanks Jon, as usual your solutions take us an extra mile.
I had thought of "fudging the scale" and started doing it when Del offered
this solution.
However, I have noted your solution for another application which I had left
on the back burner for lack of immediate solution.

"Jon Peltier" wrote:

You could fudge the scale by, for example, multiplying the times by 1000,
and not using the default date formatted axis labels. This would allow step
charts based on times instead of whole dates. I show this with my combo
XY-Area chart:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/XYAreaChart.html

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
PierreL said:
I have made progress, I was stuck on XY charts. Now with normal lines I
have
the radio button turned on but all my values are on a vertical line.
Looks
like the scale does not want to extand to a few hours, only days,
months,years.!

I see you're right, it only works for whole dates and not for times. What
a crock. Sorry I misled you. When I said that Time-scale worked on any
positive number up to 2.9 million, I was wrong; it evidently only works
with any positive *integer* up to 2.9 million.

(this also means you won't be able to have a stepped stacked area chart;
that's a technique that only works with Time-scale)

Well, if you go back to XY as you were originally, you won't need the
Time-scale format after all, so forget I said "Line chart". I just thought
a Line chart with timescale would look nicer with your times, but if the
Time-scale format won't work with your times at all, there's no advantage.
Stick with XY like you had at first. You can still format the X axis with
time format.

Here's a sample of my layout

Time Average
4:21:01 0.84
5:35:28 0.84

5:35:28 0.19
6:55:12 0.19

6:55:12 0.80
8:01:05 0.80

8:01:05 0.10
9:00:14 0.10

This layout gives you horizontal lines and no verticals, with a Scatter
(XY) type, formatted as lines and no symbols (or lines and symbols, but
not symbols and no lines). I've tested it this time, and it works. If you
leave out the blank lines, the graph will have vertical steps between the
horizontals.

You can find the X error bars in the "Format Series..X Error Bars" tab, if
you want to try that method. The Custom box at the bottom lets you enter a
range for horizontal lines.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.