In Excel, the difference between Line charts and XY charts has nothing to do with formatting the data with or without lines, and everything to do with different behavior of the X axes in the charts. I’ve written about these differences numerous times, in X Axis: Category or Value?, Scatter Chart or Line Chart?, Line-XY [...]

I came across a blog post called Is it just me? (software defaults), which asks the age-old question, Why Are My Excel Bar Chart Categories Backwards? The post was in a new blog by Alex Kerin of Data Driven Consulting. Alex works on projects in analytics and dashboarding.
I have been asked this question a number [...]

I was recently asked whether Excel can make an axis in which the value of each label was double the previous value, but the labels were equally spaced. I’ve covered custom axis scales several times (see Custom Axis Scales using Dummy Series), and this is simply another example.
The specific question was about labels 1, 2, [...]

In Daily Chart: Tax the Rich to Pay For Health Care? Conor Clarke responded to a proposal to pay for health care reform by taxing the rich. He plotted the variation in the effective Federal tax rate paid by the top 1% of households to put into perspective the effect of a few additional percent [...]

In Chart with a Dual Category Axis I showed how to make a chart with dual category labels (two rows of labels). In Individually Formatted Category Axis Labels I showed how to format axis labels individually by ignoring the built in labels and using an invisible series with individually formatted data labels. An attentive reader [...]

In Data Sets, Dick described his affection for data to his Daily Dose of Excel readers. One of his bar charts showed the life expectancy differential between men and women in various countries. In Bangladesh, men actually outlive women, so the bar extends into negative chart space, and the category label “Bangladesh” overlies this data.

Dick [...]

In The Increasing Patriotism of Iraqis (actually just a comment on the labeling of years on x-axes of graphs), Andrew Gelman showed the following chart from The Increasing Patriotism of Iraqis. The chart came from a paper by the author of The Monkey Cage blog.

Andrew commented that the X axis should have years centered between [...]

I received an email from a user of my Waterfall Chart Utility, who wanted to add a secondary axis showing percentages corresponding to the values on the primary axis. This is really just a matter of applying straightforward algebra to compute the secondary axis scale parameters from the primary axis scale parameters and the two [...]

Dr. Nicolas Bissantz wrote in Do time series charts really compare time series? about time series being difficult to compare. The chart he discussed showed the cost of energy for three different heating methods. Says Nicolas, “The lines suggest that the price for heating oil has exploded, while electricity and natural gas have increased moderately.”
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In the Calculating Easter post on John Walkenbach’s new Spreadsheet Page blog, John presented a bar chart showing the occurrences of the dates of Easter between 1900 and 2199. He sorted his dates in decreasing order of occurrence (below left). In Gradients, Fills, and Shadows, Oh My I proposed sorting in date order (below right).
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