Thanks for your comment, appreciate it. I was able to fix the problem after several hours. Once I converted the dates into numbers, and interpolated the numbers, the area chart finally looked correct.

Since the numbers wouldn’t make much sense to describe the x-axis values, I created an independent date column which then became the relevant dates to dexcribe the x-axis.

Thanks again for your response. This page is really awesome.

lukas

The area chart has to be on a different date axis with many more days. You don’t interpolate between two adjacent days on the line chart’s date, you interpolate between two far apart days on the area chart’s date axis, so you actually crss the axis at an intermediate date on the area chart’s axis.

I tried the above technique on an area chart that has the 31 days of January as x-axis. However, when I interpolate between two days to get the chart right, it is not displayed in the Excel 2003. I know the base unit is days, so maybe Excel can’t manage a data point that lies between two dates?
Any suggestions to solve the problem would be great appreciated.

Many thanks,
lukas

Thanks for the link. I tried it myself, and despite not understanding where the funky gradient definitions came from, I have written my own tutorial on the subject: Invert if Negative in Excel 2007.

Then I found this:
http://www.hichert.com/de/community/foren?func=view&catid=6&id=150

It works! And I like to share this with all of you looking for this solution!