Comments on: Line Chart vs. Step Chart

By: Irregular Time Series? No. Oversampling. « « The Excel Charts Blog The Excel Charts Blog

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 11:31:10 +0000

[...] me give you an example. A while back, Jon Peltier wrote in his blog: I don’t understand the obsession with an equal date interval. A line chart need not [...]

By: Agnes

Agnes — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:50:01 +0000

Very nice demonstration on the contrast between line chart and step chart. I like it a lot.

By: marlena

marlena — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:05:04 +0000

Brilliant! I’ve been looking for a way to plot a survival distribution (step graph) in Excel and this is hands down the simplest work around I’ve come across in my searching. Thanks!

By: James

James — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:08:41 +0000

Very useful - used your process to create this bank of england base rate chart: Many thanks!

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:03:05 +0000

Hi Bessie - What kind of numbers do you need along the X axis? If it's just integer values, you can use these in place of the dates, then tell Excel to use a date scale instead of a category scale. Dates are whole numbers, after all. Then you'll have to apply a different number format, probably General, since Excel will format your whole numbers as dates. If you need real numbers which may include fractions, you can use the XY chart with error bars, as described in Step Charts in Microsoft Excel.

By: Beesie

Beesie — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:28:49 +0000

Jon, the instructions were very useful and I obtained a beautiful line graph. Thank you!
However, I’d rather have a numbers on the x-axis and I don’t get that solved. For me, it is important at which day since the start of an experiment an event occurs, not the exact date. Does anyone have advice on how to do that? I know it is possible to do it with the error bars or just by copying data, but those are just not that elegant and involve producing a lot more data.
Thank you in advance!