Comments on: Some Comments on Dot Plots (Guest Post)

By: Product Review: Peltier Tech Charting Add-Ins for Excel

Product Review: Peltier Tech Charting Add-Ins for Excel — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:30:34 +0000

[...] Dot Plots are strange looking charts. Honestly I'm having trouble understanding how they're more appropriate than bar or line charts. Read what Naomi Robbins has to say about them: Some Comments on Dot Plots [...]

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:22:18 +0000

Jeff -

That’s a nasty bug. I’ve never noticed it, but just to be certain, I tested it out.

The named array works fine (plots 100 only, no faux zeros) in Excel 2003 and I’m certain it works fine in earlier versions. The named array also works fine in Excel 2010 Release Candidate. The named array works wrong, that is, in the manner you describe, in Excel 2007 SP2.

Anyone using 2007 should demand a free upgrade to 2010 because of the extreme flakiness of 2007. You won’t get it, of course. . . .

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Mon, 03 May 2010 10:14:28 +0000

I forgot to say that one series chart type is set as a line graph, the other as an area graph, and the last as a bar graph.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:55:35 +0000

@pompadourofdataviz I’ve posted an example at http://cid-f380a394764ef31f.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/example%20of%20dynamic%20sparklines.xlsx showing how I toggling the different graph overlays with the controls

Basically i just use three different series, with the ones I want to toggle pointing to a cell that returns =NA when a checkbox is checked.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:35:47 +0000

…by named range, I meant if you go to name manager, and input say ={100,#N/A,#N/A} and point your graph series to this named range, then excel actually plots this as {100,0,0}. But if you either input 100, =na(), =na() into three cells on the spreadsheet, excel only plots the first point.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:33:13 +0000

Just noticed a bug in Excel 2007 whereby
1) if you have a range filled with #N/A errors, they don’t show up in a graph (which is what I expected) BUT
2) if you have a named range filled with #N/A errors, they show up as zeros.

Very annoying! This means for my array-based approach in the comments above, if your axis includes zero then you’re going to get a point plotted, even though the formula evaluates to #N/A

Anyone know if this happens in other versions?