The blue bar indicates how much something should be, the orange bar shows how much there actually is. The difference in number is only 7 however the chart makes it look like the difference is more than 1/2. How can I change this to the bar chart looks more accurate to a difference of 7 and not 1/2.
Double click on y axis. The format axis tab will appear and in the axis options change the minimum limit to zero.
When using Cognos 10 report studio creating a bar chart results in Overlapping Bars. How can i seperate them so they look like this (i.e. stacked vertically)
You could use a combination chart but by default your series will overlap. One workaround is to reduce the size of the bar width of your secondary axis.
I would also be interested to know how to overcome the default overlapping of clustered and stacked combination
I want to plot a simple chart with Date on the X axis and Number on my Y axis. Tried XY scatter but Excel try to be smart and hide my data labels.
Also, Excel tried to re-order my Date which I do not want.
Date POS
22/10/2017 7
01/10/2017 14
08/09/2017 8
11/08/2017 6
28/07/2017 4
09/07/2017 3
26/06/2017 4
09/06/2017 11
19/05/2017 8
23/04/2017 8
02/04/2017 5
19/03/2017 1
19/02/2017 3
05/02/2017 10
30/01/2017 8
08/01/2017 3
20/11/2016 13
11/11/2016 7
28/10/2016 12
16/10/2016 5
30/09/2016 7
16/09/2016 3
27/08/2016 8
14/08/2016 13
24/07/2016 3
17/07/2016 7
17/06/2016 2
27/05/2016 4
24/04/2016 16
10/04/2016 1
27/03/2016 2
04/03/2016 4
19/02/2016 4
24/01/2016 1
03/01/2016 1
Would like to see everything. Is it possible ?
Thanks.
To answer your questions:
Brief:
1) You can't see all your data labels on the X axis unless you format the X axis to have major interval of 1.
2) With a scatter plot, you cannot have your original labels retained on the X axis and, in your case, as your dates are recognised , they are ordered as such. You would need to convert the dates to text and plot as a line chart without the line.
Solution:
1) Right click X axis and set the major interval to a balance between the amount of detail you want to see and that which is legible. To see all data points, with data that are whole numbers, then 1 should do it, but may become very crowded, so a trade-off.
2) To stop the re-ordering of your dates: The trick is to convert your dates to text using =TEXT(A2,"dd/mm/yy") where A2 is a data point for the X axis etc. In the picture below, this is showing above B39, as I have transposed your original dataset, but the formula was pointing at your original vertical dataset. If that makes sense.
You arrange your data horizontally with each data point in its own column (i.e. transpose your original data set) and then plot this as a line chart and right click format data series > no line. Making sure markers are visible.
On an old Mac with Excel 2011, similar process for Windows and later Excel, removing the line would look like:
And you can select a line colour and add it back in:
Reference i gave in comments which reminded me to transpose the data is scatter-chart-with-one-text-non-numerical-axis
To be honest, if you are going to plot a line chart which has one axis which appears to be dates, it may confuse users if those dates are not then in order.
I recommend to convert all values to date and graph away with standard scatter plot...if you treat the dates as text, and then graph only the entries, then the variance between the dates can be very misleading (unless there are no gaps, 100% consistent).
Below is a snippit of text and of dates with your provided data. It is nearly identical, but not quite. If your data set is larger and there is larger variation between date entries then it will definitely provide a misleading chart.
If you go with the text path, change to line chart, hide line, set color to markers, and put the max interval to 1.
If you go with the date path, then you will not be able to read the x-axis with each date explicitly stated. There would be too many dates to display. You could add data labels to display in the plot area instead of the x-axis, but it is clutter.
You have stumbled across what many also find, that Excel stinks as a graphing tool. This is because about 10 years ago, Micro Soft went stupid and started trying to make software that is "really helpful for the user" translate "makes stupid decisions we don't want". One case in point is your problem.
Excel Line charts are not line charts; they are bar charts that just use lines instead of bars. The issue at hand is how different chart types treat the X-Axis. How you treat the X-Axis determines what kind of chart you use. There are basically only two kinds of X-Axis: discreet/continuous (aka. category/value). For example category would be something like color (RED/BLUE/GREEN). There is no "distance between colors" (what is the distance between red and blue?). Where as numbers and time have a concept of distance inherent in them. For example: how many days are there between jan-1-2001 and jan-10-2001? or What is the distance from the 10 yard line and the 20 yard line?
The problem is that to use charts in Excel, you have to know how each chart type treats the X-Axis. Most people would expect the LINE chart to treat the X-Axis as a value, but MS is not most people so they decided to treat it like a category (unless it is a date more on that in a moment). So, you cannot plot a number X-Axis on a line chart. You should use the XY SCATTER chart instead. Scatter chart in Excel assumes both axis are numbers and thus plots your numeric X-Axis in the expected manner.
if you use a line chart (or bar chart) and you double click your x-axis values, or right click them, you can go to their format axis page where you will see that you have the choice of treating the x-axis as text or dates, but not numbers. This is why when you sort your data differently in a line chart or bar chart, the chart changes, it is because the x-axis is being treated as a category and categories are plotted on the chart in the order they are seen in the data. This can be very useful when your x-axis really is a category but then if that were so you would most likely be using bar charts not line charts. My experience is that BAR charts and LINE charts in Excel behave exactly the same so consider that when thinking about using a line chart.
if your x-axis is a category use bar chart or pivot table and exploit sorting.
if your x-axis is a date use bar/line chart and mark it as date in format-axis page.
if your x-axis is a number use scatter chart.
if your data is something else, or you have a specific perspective you want to emphasize, then do some reading about the different chart types in Excel and pick the one that was created to show what you want to show.
I am trying to plot a stacked bar chart for number of accounts we opened in spotfire; since there are a lot of values, I used the bin function for number and I am coloring by Names of Account-Holding agencies. Spotfire is stacking these colors by agencies high to low; I'd like to make is low to high such that the contributors of maximum accounts are the topmost color in the chart. Traditional sorting of bars is not working. Could someone please let me know if there is any alternative way I can sort by colors?
This feature is available in the latest release, 7.5. We have not upgraded to 7.5 yet but stacked bar chart sorting is mentioned on page 5 of the release notes.
I would like to create a bar-chart (or a histogram?) with vertical bars and a numerical x-axis , but I do not know how/where to start. I have MS-Excel and Origin-plot available with me. My intended chart would look like this:
You can more or less get what you want by adding and styling error bars appropriately to a scatter plot. The error bar is a simple way to force Excel to draw a line under/over the point.
Chart with data and error bars
Couple steps
Make an XY scatter chart
Add the error bars and delete the horizontal ones that come up
Set the negative error bar for the points to be equal to the same value that is being plotted
Set the positive error bar to 0 so it does not show
Change the formatting on the error bar to be thicker
Possible hide the initial dot shown so that it is bar only
You could take these steps and codify them with some VBA to prevent the tedious nature of doing this multiple times. Setting error bars is one of the worst activities to have to do continually.
I believe you should also be able to get your desired colors by adding multiple series. Possibly all the more reason to do this with VBA.