Comments on: Chart Point Limits in Excel 2010

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:58:21 +0000

Excel 2010 is only available now to beta testers and reviewers.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:58:46 +0000

Where does one obtain Excel 2010? Please email me if you know. aka_jim@ymail.com.

THANKS !!

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:29:55 +0000

I have used 32 bit versions of 2010 TP and 2003 SP3 on a laptop with around 1.5MB of RAM running 32 bit Windows XP SP3.

By: Peder Schmedling

Peder Schmedling — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:35:19 +0000

Interesting post. According to the below blog-entry on the Microsoft Excel Team blog, the number of points per data series is limited by the available memory on the machine..

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/08/25/more-charting-enhancements-in-excel-2010.aspx

What setup did you test this on?
(OS, 32/64bit, RAM installed?)

A 64bit setup should be able to address an enormous amount of memory, but I don’t know what the memory manager in post-2003 versions of Excel can cope with..

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:01:22 +0000

In my old job in a laboratory, I was able to produce very high resolution charts with excel of gamma ray spectra of Uranium powders.

Getting the data into excel was tedious, but the quality of the chart was great. I used the thinnest line possible. This was back in the days of 20 Mhz 386 machines being “state of the art”.

Spectral analysis may be a venue for these huge data sets.

By: derek

derek — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:05:00 +0000

I have a little private challenge to myself called the Million Point Challenge, inspired by your remarks on large data sets being hard to graph usefully. The idea is to create a small multiple of at least four scatter graphs, having a total of a million data points, printed on a page no larger than A3, without the picture being a mess.

(it has to be at least four, because Excel before 2007 allows at most a quarter million points)

I’ve made good progress with the techniques necessary, but I’m now stalled by a different problem: just how often do any of us ever see a genuinely interesting data set that has a million points? So now I’m looking out for data I can use to demo the techniques. It should ideally have at least two two quantitative dimensions and at least one category dimension (or a quantitative dimension that can be binned into categories) and have interesting structure.

By: AdamV

AdamV — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:42:17 +0000

No, the online and offline help for Excel 2010 both have the old limits at the moment. But then the offline help is also labelled as being for 2007, so this looks like they simply have not replaced those files yet.

You are absolutely right – this does seem to be raising or removing a limit for some pretty arbitrary reasoning, beyond the usual level of resolution available, particularly for on-screen use. I guess you could have much larger charts which you would have to show full screen or possibly scroll around to see anything worthwhile – or use some kind of “deep zoom” facility to move in and see more detail.