Charts in excel 2008 for mac

[Janus]

I am having problems getting excel to create a basic line chart.

Data is in format of

Column A - Dates
Column B - Series 1 values
Column c - Series 2 values

In windows excel I just select the data range and chart type line and there it is. when I do this with excel 2008 on the mac I get odd results. I've tried editing the data to set up series etc and editing the series formula (which only appears some of the time) to add the date column as the X axis. However even when the series formula appears and I edit it I then get 0 for all values plotted even though the cells contain non zero values.

I have tried also a small 'test' table in exactly the same format with made up data and while I got the same incorrect set up at first I was able to edit the series formula at get the data to display correctly.

This seems like a bug in excel - are MS aware of it or working on a fix?

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

In order to help you, we need to know exactly what you are doing and what
"having problems" and "odd results" means. If you select your data and then
chose a chart from the gallery it should work just like 2004 with the chart
wizard. What are you doing? What is Excel doing (not doing) that you think
is wrong?

 

[Janus]

Thanks for the reply. Let me try and be more specific.

Data is laid out as described above. eg
Column 1 has
1/3/08 etc
Column 2 has
45.4 etc.
Column 3 has
39.4 etc.

The first row has "Date", "Price A" and "Price B" respectively.

I select the range of data that I want to plot. For the sake of example C1R1 to C3R10, C1R1 is actual cell range and sheet name not the literal characters I'm just saving space and using the CR notation).

I select "gallery" "charts" "Line" and click on the line chart icon for multiple lines (icon 1).

Then I get a chart with the date values in the title and 1 data point (value of 0) with a x axis label of the last date in the range.

If I can select the =series() expression (for some reason I cannot always get this to display as I cannot highlight the data series consistently in the chart) it contains:

=series(,C1R1:C3R10,C2R2:C2R10,1)

The second series does not display at all.

If I edit this to =series(C2R1,C1R2:C1R10,C2R2:C2R10,1)

I can then get the dates as labels along the x-axis but all the values are 0 not those in cells C2R2 to C2R10.

By adding a series using the Select Data Source toolbox I can get a second data series to show on the chart but again all values are 0 and I cannot get it to use the date for the x-axis even by editing the =series() formula.

Hope that makes more specific sense.

 

[Janus]

More information on this problem

I discovered that excel was not recognising the data in the cells as numeric despite having been able to use the content of the cells in mathematical formulae. ie in the cell it has 42.24 in another cell I can reference this cell and multiply by 2 with the correct results. However, when I try to select the (original) cell to include in a chart it is not recognising the values as numeric.

If I create another column and put =C1R1 * 1 as a formula into that column then create the chart it works !!

I think this is a bug.

Incidently I am also having problems putting the graphs into powerpoint as if I add the chart in powerpoint and copy the values it transposes the rows and columns in display and I cannot select any options to edit this. If I cut and past the chart it change the date (eg Feb-08 becomes Feb-04). Another 'design feature' or a bug?