Excel Charting (help)

[Steve Kay]

Hi everyone, Can anyone help?

I am having difficutly chart what I thought would be
easy.. I have 500 rows of dates in one column. (there
is lots of other information-data on the sheet). I want
to plot a line graph with the Dates on the X and NUMBER OF
DATES (ie counta) on the Y axis... The only way I know
how to do this is to place a number 1 to 500 in the
respective cell next to the date... and then plot it....
is there a better way?? Excel 97 & NT :-(

 

[Bernard V Liengme]

Hi Steve,
From your message it appears the data in the column of interest has many
repeat values.
Do you know the unique values? If so you could make a list of them on a
blank sheet and use them as the 'bin' values for a FREQUENCY formula.

Or you could select the 500 data items and use Data|Pivot table. You will
get an odd answer at first I expect because Excel want to SUM the dates but
you can change the Table to Count them. Send me the file (or a file with a
copy of the relevant data) and I'll do it for you if you get stuck.
Bernard
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme