Excel 2007 Scatter Plot Freak Out!

[Paul Z.]

I am a fairly experience Excel XP and 2003 user and I have a few questions:

Why is it when I work with scatter plots in Excel 2007 my dual Xeon CPU
computer with 4 GB RAM slows to a crawl? Is this a feature? It's never done
that with Excel XP, Excel 2003, or any other application.

How does one add chart and axis labels to a scatter plot? Not that I need
them, all my end users prefer scatter plots with no axis labels. That way
the charts can be interpreted any way they please. Yet another feature?

Given a scatter plot with a singe series of 4 data points, how does one add
a 2nd degree polynomial trend line to the data? And why is it when I try to
do that and display the polynomial equation on the chart a linear equation is
displayed? Is Excel 2007 dropping the 2nd degree factor from the trend line
label or is Excel 2007 refusing to do a quadratic fit because it thinks I do
not have enough data points? Another feature, right?

 

[Mike Middleton]

Paul Z -

How does one add chart and axis labels to a scatter plot? <

Chart Tools | Layout | (Labels) Chart Title | ...
and
Chart Tools | Layout | (Labels) Axis Titles | ...

Given a scatter plot with a singe series of 4 data points, how does one
add a 2nd degree polynomial trend line ... < and
when I try to do that <

So, it seems you do know how to add a polynomial of order 2 trendline, but
you don't like the result. When I use four points and "look at the data" and
there is an obvious curvilinear relationship, Excel produces an appropriate
quadratic fit. If I use four points that are exactly linear, Excel does not
include the squared term in the best fit.

- Mike
http://www.mikemiddleton.com

 

[JLatham]

Since the other features have been addressed, I guess I'll tackle this one:

"Why is it when I work with scatter plots in Excel 2007 my dual Xeon CPU
computer with 4 GB RAM slows to a crawl? Is this a feature? It's never done
that with Excel XP, Excel 2003, or any other application."

I figure it must be a feature - does same on both my AMD X2 4800+ dual-core
2GB system and on my Intel E6600 Core-Duo 2GB systems. Doing one set of x-y
scattercharts on either of those two machines takes 11 to 12 minutes to
complete, and once complete, then system performance while in Excel is on par
with a laptop with a dead battery. Same work on a single-core AMD 3200+
system with 1 GB of RAM and Excel 2003 takes about 1minute 40 seconds.

 

[Bernard Liengme]

I would like to experiment with this. Can you send me a file with data (no
chart) and tell me what activity makes a dual cpu system crawl.
Thanks