I am trying to plot multiple y values for the same series on the same x value in a line chart across a period of time. As a background, I would like to create a line chart (or scatter plot) of rankings for a particular professor over a period of time. However, the problem lies in that professors teach multiple sections in a given quarter. As a result, I’m unable to utilize a series to encapsulate more than one section for a given period, which results in each section having its own series (as opposed to each professor having their own series that captures all sections they teach). I would like for each professor to show up as one series (i.e., color) across time in the chart. Any help would be great!
final chart
Related
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 have managed to plot two different data sets on the same axis however, I'm also looking to plotting another line showing their average.
The main problem is that both data sets have different X (time) values so it's not possible to add an average column at the end and plot that. (See the highlighted row 22 for example, corresponding Time values are different)
Is there any way I can plot an average of two plots on the same axis?
One idea that might work is to place the values of both series, one above the other in two new columns, sort this new data according to time, smooth it, then plot the smoothed combined data. Alternatively, you could do the smoothing by simply plotting the new sorted series, adding a moving average trendline to it, then change the formatting of the new series so that it is no longer visible (but the trendline is). Something like this:
In the above picture, series 3 is the plot of the sorted aggregate data of series 1 and 2. If you change the formatting of series 3 so that there is no line, you get something like this:
For my relatively small mock data sets, the results are admittedly poor (it was based on just 25 data points in each series), but if you have a large amount of closely spaced data, and you play around with the moving average window size, you might get something acceptable. If not, you should probably just interpolate both datasets to obtain two consistent time series.
I have 2 data series, which records how much a user is meditating/attentive (out of 100) plotted onto a graph. The x axis is the number of seconds since the start of the experiment, and the y axis shows the value for meditation/attention at that point of time.
I have a 3rd set of data that is a series of key timestamps during the experiment (not exactly matching the timestamps from attention/meditation values).
I want to create a graph where you can compare how the attention/meditation values change at the key points
Whether the key points are highlighted by a line or dots I don't care. I tried adding the 3rd data set as a secondary axis, but it still uses the original x-axis of the main graph and I don't know how to make excel do what I want.
Thanks in advance
You should use an XY Scatter chart, not a line chart. A line chart ignores any numerical value in the X values, treats each X value as a text label, and uses the X values from the first series as X values for all series.
You can format the first two series so that they use lines and not markers, and the third so it uses markers without lines.
You may find this link helpful: superuser.com/questions/825692 You don't need to use the secondary axis, just add another series with tag times and constant 45 value, then format vertical error bars to 100% and horizontal to 0%.
Please dont eat me because of this question :)
I have some data in excel and I would like to make a graphical representation of those data. Structure of my data:
persons ID : from 1 to 485 to every person, there is one parameter like average jumping distance and another parameter (like height) and finally there is a class to which every person belongs to (1, 2 or 3).
To assign persons to classes I have used k-means algorithm.
Now I would like to make a graph of this result. How can I do it please in excel (or by using another tool)?
Thank you
I would use a scatter (XY chart with markers and no lines). Plot average jumping distance on one axis, height on the second axis. Then for the classes I would separate all the data into 3 series and use different colors for each series. I would adjust the marker size to see which one works best with the data.
Here is a fast example to give you an idea how to it would look like. Its not as easy as just clicking once to insert the chart from the data though:
Im using System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting
for creating charts.
I want to plot different timevalues against the different dates
where Time values will be in Y axis and Date Values will be in X axis.
I tried using
chart.Series[0].XValueType = ChartValueType.Date;
chart.Series[0].YValueType = ChartValueType.Time;
For adding im taking from
Dictionary<DateTime,DateTime>
and
chart.Series[0].Points.AddXY(item.Key.ToOADate(),item.Value.ToOADate());
But it is giving a 45 degree line chart but i want it like a trend Report.
Actually my mistake is, I added the items to the series from the dictionary and then i gave the xvaluetype and yvaluetype
But now i fixed it by giving the xvalue type and yvaluetype before adding the item to the series.