Dear John

Many thanks for your advice, you nailed it. Although I did have to work hard
to impress upon XL my interest in getting a result.

I had to use the =Value() function prior to the PVT (in conjunction with the
=Datedif(date()) fiddle) and then set up a dummy table after the PVT with
=IF(B30.01,VALUE(B3),NA())
before the chart would play ball. And then it did as a regular xy
scatterplot with all the docile features.

Note that I have spent about 6 hrs in the last few days investigating R and
Genstat (which both are appealing), but working with something familiar got
me up and running in 3/4 hour.

Big thumbs up to this community group.

Kind regards

Bill Williamson
Australia

"Jon Peltier" wrote:

Check that all of the apparent numbers are treated as such by Excel. When
you do grouping by time periods in a pivot table, for example, the resulting
labels are text, not numeric, even if they look like years. There are any
number of other ways numbers may be encoded as text. Sometimes, but not
always, text can be used in formulas and seem fine. For example, if I have
text dates, the formula =YEAR(textdate) gives me the year. Text is displayed
as it is entered without regard to number formats.

Also, a date axis uses dates, that is day-month-year values, not just
day-month or days since last August 1. Changing the number format doesn't
hide the fact that a date is comprised of day, month, and year.

- Jon
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Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services, Inc.
http://PeltierTech.com/WordPress/
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