I ran into this interesting "feature" while plotting something in Excel (Office 365 ProPlus, Version 1705, Build 8201.2200). The plot is shown below, with the other axes removed.
The vertical axis is supposed to extend from 0.0 to 1.0E-12, and it does -- as far as the vertical is concerned. There is an additional value of 1.2E-13 that seems to be floating out there for no reason. The same thing happens if I set the vertical axis Bounds to "Auto".
Interestingly, if I delete the orange curve (whose maximum value is well within the current vertical axis), the vertical axis values seem to correctly snap to their proper positions:
What is going on, and how can I fix this error? Is it a bug, or do I have a box checked that I shouldn't have checked?
Related
Please have a look at This Excel chart. Here is a screenshot:
Here is the data:
There is a scatter series of blue of dots (plus a trendline) and a green area series. The chart data are contained within the series.
The problem I have is that the x-axis values of the two series are not aligned. For example, the second and third blue dots at x = 3.1 and x = 3.8 are in the correct place along the x-axis, but in the green area series they appear to be above x = 2.0 and x = 3.3. How to fix this?
Change the Scatter to a Line Chart, then format Line Color so that there is "No Line". Add trendline.
There may be another way to do this while retaining the Scatterplot, I'm not sure, but this seems to be visually what you're looking for, but I think you will need to use a Line Chart for this unfortunately. The problem is summarized in this similar Q on SuperUser:
https://superuser.com/questions/964264/aligning-stacked-bar-chart-w-scatter-plot-data
The short answer is that your combining (unsuccessfully) a categorical series (the columns) with interval/ratio series (the line charts). So, Excel doesn't know how to plot your categories (columns) on an interval scale (the current X axis).
You can verify this by selecting Chart > Layout > Axes > Secondary Horizontal Axis > More Secondary Horizontal Axis Options. Without making any changes to the axes configuration, the second X-axis will now appear along the bottom of the chart, and you can see it is scaled differently from your Scatter data.
I.e., in the Scatter series, the data is X/Y pairs. But in your Area chart, it treats the X-values as categorical, and in this context "1.1" is no different than "Bob" -- it is a cardinal representation of the data rather than an ordinal representation.
The problem I have is that the x-axis values of the two series are not aligned.
So even though the two series appear to share the same set of X-Values, the Chart is simply incapable of treating those as the same type of data. The x-axes are not aligned because they are not the same data or even the same type of data!
All that said, if you change both series to XY Scatter, it is possible (with some extraordinary effort) to apply shading/coloring below a series or between two series, etc.
http://peltiertech.com/fill-under-between-series-in-excel-chart/
http://chandoo.org/wp/2013/02/13/shaded-line-charts-excel/
What you can do is plot the Area graph on a secondary axis. Then go to Chart -> Layout -> Axes -> Display Secondary Horizontal Axis to see the axis, right click for its properties and change the type of the Axis Type to "Date axis". This (kind of) changes the axis to a numerical type, as opposed to a category type.
However, the area graph will still be placed incorrectly too far to the right because Excel will continue to plot the series as a (kind of) category type, with its data points appearing in the centre of each category as opposed to at the correct x value like in an XY scatter plot.
To get the graphs overlaying the most correctly, you can create a Scaled-up x value series which is, say, 1,000 times the original x-values and use this for the x-values of the area plot. By scaling by 1,000 or 10,000, you eventually get the granularity to a point where it looks more like X-Y plot, but is actually an area plot, and the graphs look like they coincide perfectly.
I've made a chart with Excel 2010's "Combo" option for chart type so I can plot two data series for the same depth points. The image below shows the default, which is very close to what I want - except I would like to have the axes flipped so that the current X axis, which is depth, is displayed as the Y axis and both primary and secondary current Y axes plot as X axes. In other words, I'd like to rotate the chart area by 90 degrees clockwise. The "Switch Row/Column" doesn't do what I want (or expect) and I'm running out of both ideas and patience. Is there an easy fix? Or a hard fix?
Here's the plot as-is:
And here's a dummy plot of the end goal made by rotating the image around in Paint, in case the picture makes it clearer:
Finally, as was pointed out in the comments, the whole thing looks goofy and might be better plotted as a bar graph with two bars. I tried this as well and came away almost all set - but the gray bars plot from left to right and the blue bars plot from right to left. Seems like it should be as simple as changing the "Plot Series On" option to Primary Axis for both, but this destroys the graph.
I looked around and I think this link has instructions for what you're looking for: https://superuser.com/questions/188064/excel-chart-with-two-x-axes-horizontal-possible
Im using Excel for Mac 2011 and I have the following figure
I would like to still show the bubbles outside of the available chart area, while keeping the maximum and minimum axes values unchanged.
Create an identical chart with the same data, but with axis limits that show the full bubbles. Then set all the formatting in the chart other than the bubbles to the equivalent of "none", i.e, no axis labels, chart outlines, gridlines, chart and plot borders, background color, etc.
With very careful sizing and positioning of this bubbles-only chart over the original chart, you can get the bubbles to extend beyond the plot area of the original. If the size or position of a bubble is a little off, modify the overlay chart's data by the tiny amount needed to get the bubble to cover the underlying original bubble. Turn off the formatting for the underlying bubbles as last step.
NOT programmatic, very trial and error, and fussy, of course, and I hope someone comes up with a more elegant way to achieve your goal. But I was able to get it to work on my Windows machine.
I'm working on a custom plot on top of which I add a second blank axis object to show a secondary scale on the right hand side of the graph (as well as the primary scale on the left hand side).
Works great (and had been, for years), until I tried it again recently in R2010a and for some reason the primary axis gets its Position property tweaked when the figure is resized or printed, so that it looks OK on the screen at first, but when I print it or resize the figure, the two axes don't line up vertically.
What would do this, and how can I set it up so the two axes maintain the same position?
aha: I think I found it:
http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/creating_plots/f1-32495.html
Controlling Axes Size
When you create a graph, MATLAB automatically creates an axes to display the graph. The axes is sized to fit in the figure and automatically resizes as you resize the figure. However, MATLAB applies the automatic resize behavior only when the axes Units property is set to normalized (the default).
Note: MATLAB changes only the current axes' properties by default. If your plot has multiple axes, MATLAB will not automatically resize any secondary axes.
You can control the resize behavior of the axes using the following axes properties:
...
ActivePositionProperty — Specifies whether to use the OuterPosition or the Position property as the size to preserve when resizing the figure containing the axes.
You may find the linkprop function helpful
I'm using Excel 2007 to create a log-scale chart of numbers (specifically the Zimbabwean dollar exchange rate) over time. I'm using an x-y scatterplot and noticing one odd quirk.
The range of y values (numbers) spans a factor of about 10^30. On every chart I make using this data, half the gridlines are missing. Specifically, only the gridlines corresponding to the largest values show up. In fact, regardless of the total range only the top factor of 10^13 or so have gridlines. This is not dependent on the log base.
Am I doing something wrong? Is this a known bug? I can't find any references to this issue on google or microsoft's bug reports.
Silly work around as well, but if you are going to be presenting your graph in Powerpoint, you can make the background color of the graph "no fill" and then when you paste it into Powerpoint (I paste it as a PDF). You can draw grid lines and match them up with the ticks on the y-axis. Arrange your graph "bring to front" when you are finished drawing so that the lines won't appear in front of your data. You can group it all to make sure the lines don't shift while making your presentation and so that they re-size properly if you re-size your graph.
I'm having the same problem, it's definitely a bug.
Try a sequence 1, 10, 100, 1e+12, 1e+30 vs 0..4 and plot x,y scatter, and clearly the scale grid is messed-up even in linear, and in log is the behaviour you described.
My workaround was to make a transformation of the values and depict them scaled down (by a Million factor). That way the data the graph is handling is never above 10e9 (the value I started to hit issues).
So, my suggestion is: graph a Log version of the data (and clearly make a legend for it)
I was able to replicate your problem and come up with a pseudo-workaround.
The formatting goes a bit funny, but all the lines show up if you right-click on the axis, select Format Axis. Under the Axis Options, there is a Horizontal Axis Crosses setting. Changing it from Automatic to Maximum Axis Value causes all the gridlines to appear.
Ran into same thing: Will not show log grid lines for y-axis ranging below 1e-7. Have need for dynamic range of 1e5 down to 1e-15. Tagging auto or max will show grid, but puts axis labels in non-useful place for display.
My workaround: used Open Office to get what I needed. Could not find useful solution in Excel 2010.