I recently described how How Excel Calculates Automatic Chart Axis Limits. The problem with these automatic limits is that they often leave a little too much white space around the outside of the plotted data, especially between the lowest data point and zero. So in Calculate Nice Axis Scales in Excel VBA I presented code that takes [...]

In a recent post I described how How Excel Calculates Automatic Chart Axis Limits. The problem with these automatic limits is that they often leave a little too much white space around the outside of the plotted data, especially between the lowest data point and zero. But it’s tedious to guess at your own axis scale, and [...]

Excel’s automatic axis scaling often seems somewhat mysterious, and it’s not easy to find information about it. Microsoft has a couple articles in the MSDN knowledge base, How Chart Axis Limits Are Determined and XL2000: How Chart Axis Limits Are Determined, but the most recent of these was directed at Excel 2000. The algorithms described in these [...]

In your dashboard, you may have several charts that show different but related data, and you’d like them to have the same axis scales to make comparisons from chart to chart possible. You could manually reset the axis scales whenever the data changes, or you could write some VBA code to keep them synchronized, but I’m [...]

Last week, in You Have 1 New Notification On Klout!, I used social media metrics site Klout to illustrate how choice of axis scales can exaggerate or wash out the variation in a data set. Today I’ll pick on another social media metrics site, Topsy, to show how to pick meaningful axis tick spacing parameters. A [...]

Every so often I get an email with a subject line that’s something like “Jon, you have 1 new notification on Klout!” Wow, another social network thing, to go with all the other ones. Sure, I follow a bunch of people on Twitter every day, and I have a neglected Facebook account and a LinkedIn [...]