Comments on: Changes to Charting in Excel 2007

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:33:14 +0000

Jay -

There are issues with line-XY combination charts where the X axis is a date scale axis. I’ve written updates of some of my tutorials, but there are just too many. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I’ll check out all of the Add-A-Line pages.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:59:34 +0000

Jon,
Have always apprecaited your site and found it useful. For charting in 2007, one small snag I have found. You have an excellent article on creating vertical bars on charts (http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/AddLineVertSeries.html) that I have used multiple times in 2003. Works like a charm. However, when I try the same thing in 2007, the dates never come out right. Was wondering if you have seen this as well and have any tips?

Example:
Status
11/02/09 0
11/02/09 1

The vertical line ends up way over to the right.

Saw this same behaviour in 2003, but when you deleted the secondary x axis, the line shirted to the correct date.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:51:17 +0000

Ken - I have a handful of posts relating to Excel 2010. The interface is pretty much the same mess as in 2007, but chart redrawing performance has improved significantly.

By: Ken Morison

Ken Morison — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:54:32 +0000

Great summary. Shame I didn’t find it a year ago. I thought I’d get around it with a custom VBA interface, but the documentation on that and macro recording is terrible. Now I can’t find such simple syntax as the colour of the border on a series marker.

Any news on Excel 2010 yet?

By: constanza

constanza — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:17:13 +0000

Thanks for all your answers!

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:19:06 +0000

Worksheet function or VBA? In either case, don’t use concatenate, put the value (date and time) in the cell, and display it with a custom number format. To show days and a space and hours with two decimal places, use a format like

d h.00

By: Yohay

Yohay — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:55:17 +0000

Hi Jon, How are you?

I’ve written an expression in CONCATENATE that combines both days & hours.
I want to show the days with 0 decimals and the hours with 1 or 2 decimals. It’s all under the same statement. How can I do such a thing? it’s kinda like Casting in C language, right? Do I need VB for that or I can plug it in the statement line? If VB what should write?

Many thanks & Best wishes,
Yohay.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:07:09 +0000

Jeff - Constanza's referring to the line smoothing formatting feature, which actually uses a Bezier algorithm to compute the smoothed curve. Because of this, it may make a nice looking smooth line, but the line may extend well beyond any sensible values. Here's a set of alternating pairs of 0 and 1 values plotted using the smoothed lines option:

The LOESS bombs out with only 4 points, but with 5 and 6 points, it doesn't fit the data, and the two LOESS fits diverge:

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:42:55 +0000

When you use the smooth lines option, you run the risk of plotting incorrect or misleading lines, as described in Smooth Talking Lies.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:41:35 +0000

Constanza – perhaps this is because the function can also give a misleading match at each end of the series, because it has less data points with which to perform a regression on points in a moving range around the X value than it does everywhere else (and it might be substituting zero values for any missing data). I just wrote about something similar on another of Jons pages at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/loess-utility-for-excel/#comment-19427#ixzz0Rmsoa8Qk – this might help answer your question.