My chart is messed up. It's got an x axis of dates, almost every day over the last year has an entry. The y axis is a number from 1 to 4000. There are several data serieses.



If my x-axis is set to automatic, it makes a huge gap at both sides of the chart, going from far earlier to far later than the range of dates I've input.

So to work around this, I have to manually change the range to something sensible. Then I encounter a different problem - it needs me to input the date in what I presume is computerised date form, the number of days since 1900.

Does anyone know how to fix either of these two problems?

Is this a chart created in Word or is it in Excel? You generally have better control in Excel so that I where I would be creating it.

Maybe you should post a file containing the chart so we can see what your data range contains

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I wasn't aware I could do that. Surely it's the same programming in the whole suite? I use Excel for the data of course.

Attached.

Attached Files

Chart.docx (94.8 KB, 4 views)

It actually starts where your data starts, 12/22/21, and ends at 12/30/22, just a little ahead of your last input date value.

I am seeing what you're seeing in adjusting the min and max axis values. The trick to figuring that out is to open Excel, type those two numbers in there (44552.0 and 44925.0) and then apply a date numeric style and you'll see they are 12/22/21 and 12/30/22. If you want to adjust your chart to start at say, March first, you can use Excel to convert that date to a number value (44621) and plug that in.

That said, as Guessed mentioned, this whole process is just easier in Excel, especially with something with as many values as you have. Also, you set your top cutoff at 3500, but you have values that go over 30,000 in the early part of your chart which aren't going to show up.

Dates as an axis in either program are going to be processed, by default, in whichever way they are going to chunk up best. I plopped your data into Excel, and it defaults to labeling by month, which may not correspond to your exact dates. In Excel there's an easy adjustment to the axis where you can change it to a "text axis" - at least in 365 which is what I have. I can remember in old versions having to put an apostrophe in front of the number to get Excel to treat the date label as text.

You also had a row of data below your date-labeled rows that was much smaller in value. I removed that for the Excel mock-up attached.

Attached Files

chart_excel.xlsx (93.0 KB, 1 views)

Actually, it only starts and ends correctly because I manually set it. Add the x-axis back and edit it, change it to auto. That will then leave a monstrous gap at each end. Your version seems to be working, and mine used to in Word a long time ago.

Yes, I'm manually getting the right number from Excel, but surely there's an easier way? Why can't I input date values, since it's a date axis!

I know the large numbers don't show up, I'm not interested in things which have shot up in value, I want to see the higher end in more detail.

I thought they all used the same coding for the chart, so I didn't even consider using Excel.

The row of data below was just me calculating the change for that day out of interest and not intended for the graph.

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Looking at your Excel version, thanks very much for that, can you help me with a few things?

What is in sheet 1?

How do I change the shape of the chart to fit on my 16:9 monitor? I was unable to shrink the height using the bottom middle little dot thing.

How do I see the title for each column when I'm down at the bottom of the data in sheet 2? Word kept the title at the top so I knew which column I was editing/looking at.

I added a few lines of data at the bottom of sheet 2, but it didn't automatically change the axis to include them in the chart.

Ouch, I give up. I'm going back to Word. In addition to the four things causing problems in the post just above this one, Excel also messes up the date line when I try to add more lines. To fix this I had to change to scatter instead of line chart, which gave me the senseless borders on the left and right just like Word. So I was back to square one, but with additional problems. I guess we just have to live with Office being a buggy piece of shit.