I have a long list of dates (about 2000) in an excel spreadsheet and I want to see how many of these dates lie within particular years (and roughly which part of the year also if possible). I know how to make basic graphs in excel, but I'm not sure how to make a bar graph that uses dates. Any suggestions?
I can obviously split events in day, month, and year and then use count to count the amount of each year, but this would not show the placement of the event within the year in the final graph.
20/03/2000
2/04/2000
3/04/2000
26/05/2000
7/06/2000
20/06/2000
22/06/2000
10/07/2000
12/07/2000
22/07/2000
2/08/2000
8/08/2000
11/08/2000
14/08/2000
15/08/2000
12/09/2000
15/09/2000
20/09/2000
25/09/2000
2/10/2000
22/10/2000
24/10/2000
25/10/2000
27/10/2000
1/11/2000
10/11/2000
13/11/2000
16/11/2000
18/11/2000
20/11/2000
25/11/2000
27/11/2000
3/12/2000
6/12/2000
20/12/2000
21/12/2000
22/12/2000
4/01/2001
7/01/2001
11/01/2001
24/01/2001
25/01/2001
2/02/2001
4/02/2001
9/02/2001
12/02/2001
13/02/2001
20/02/2001
21/02/2001
2/03/2001
11/04/2001
19/04/2001
20/04/2001
21/04/2001
24/04/2001
27/04/2001
28/04/2001
2/05/2001
3/05/2001
5/05/2001
12/05/2001
13/06/2001
20/06/2001
25/06/2001
3/07/2001
5/07/2001
18/07/2001
20/07/2001
21/07/2001
22/07/2001
25/07/2001
4/08/2001
5/08/2001
9/08/2001
10/08/2001
11/08/2001
12/08/2001
13/08/2001
31/08/2001
11/09/2001
12/09/2001
17/09/2001
3/10/2001
10/10/2001
18/10/2001
21/10/2001
23/10/2001
4/11/2001
5/11/2001
17/11/2001
22/11/2001
23/11/2001
27/11/2001
29/11/2001
3/12/2001
I cannot check this in earlier versions of Excel, but in Excel 2016, if you build a Pivot Table with your data and drop the date in the Rows - you get your data grouped in Years, Quarters, and Months. If you also drop the date into Values, then you get the Count of values in each year, quarter, and month.
Then a pivot chart looks like this ...
A less magical way to do it
Applies to Excel 2013 and up
From your single column of dates, build a pivot table.
Put the date in Rows. Put Count of date in Values.
Select any one of the dates. Right Click and choose "Group...", or choose "Group Selection" from the Analyze ribbon.
Click on each of Months, Quarters, and Years.
Filter how you would like.
Select PivotChart from the Analyze Ribbon.
You can create a scatter graph as suggested in the comment. Consider your data set and see if there is any other quality that could be added to the chart, which could be plotted on the value axis. For example the number of people attending the event, or the duration of the event in seconds, or something like that, so that the graph contains more information. In the following screenshot, the blue dots are just the 1's from column B plotted on the time line. The orange dots plot another data aspect on the vertical axis.
If you create a pivot table of the dates and drag the date into the Sums area you will get a count of each day, make sure this is sorted. Then a chart will show the number of records for each day. You will need to copy and past values from the pivot to a new sheet to be able to make a scatter diagram from the output of the pivot table (in Excel 2010). But once it is a scatter diagram the events will be in the "correct" places.
If you wanted to group it by month instead you could use a formula to create a column of year & month and then do the pivot and chart on that column. For example the formula below will give you 201605 for May 2016.
=YEAR(A2)&RIGHT(100+MONTH(A2),2)
Weeks would be a bit trickier, but I suppose you could divide the date by seven and then INT it to get a 7 day grouping. These wont show the actual events occurance within the period but would let you see which periods have the most events.If you are looking for things like more events at the beginning of the month or something you might need to try different "groupings" like weekly.
Related
My goal is to have a count of three different dates by month in a bar chart. Currently we are using a count if formula then building the chart above that, would like a cleaner solution. I have three columns, Open, Action, and closed dates. Adding all three to the axis doesn't produce the right results. I'm stuck. Is there something in the pivot that I can change? I'm pulling the data in via Power Query, is there something there I can change? Many thanks :-)
Ideal state
Recent Action and Closed dates are not show up, that seems to be the real issue. Why and how to fix it?
Sample of data
Created a date table in Power Query.
Also in Power query, duped my data then deleted all but the columns I didn't need.
Unpivoted the three date columns.
Joined the new date to the date table.
Graphs fine.
I have a basic spreadsheet with dates and amounts:
When I create a chart, Excel displays the values on a per-data-point basis. I would like the points to be displayed on a per-month basis.
Similar to this question, but without a pivot chart.
First I made another column which extracted just the month out of the dates:
=MONTH(<date cell>)+((YEAR(<date cell>)-2015)*12)
Then using #asongtoruin's suggestion, I ended up making a series of cells for each month
Eg:
=SUMIF(<range of months>, 0,<range of values>)
=SUMIF(<range of months>, 1,<range of values>)
=SUMIF(<range of months>, 2,<range of values>)
I then had a series of month-only data:
Which I could then make a chart for:
So,
I cannot find a solution.
I have a very large file with timesteps from 1950 to 1970, daily.
I want to plot the date on the x axis with its values on the y axis.
So I marked my values with the dates, clicked on "Insert" and then "PivotChart" and everything looks fine.
I want to define the timesteps shown on the x-Axis (Just every second year i.e.) but it seems that the PivotChart does not recognize that my x-Axis values are dates.
Any Ideas how I can change that?!
Thanks a lot!
I don't think you can use a Pivot Chart according to the Display dates on a category axis article at support.office.com.
I suppose you'll need to use a Line chart if you want to display by every two years.
You can also group the data in the Pivot Table, which will cause a corresponding change in the Pivot Chart. In Excel 2007, that was limited to every year -- without an option for multiple years (as there is for days). But perhaps that has changed in later versions?
I have daily sales figures that I'd like to plot on a simple linegraph.
I would like them to be shown in monthly buckets (i.e. if I sold 5€ on Jan 01 and 10€ on Jan 24, I would like to see only one data point for January with 15€ in it).
Please note that I don't want to use any supporting formula/VBA script, I want to do this using only chart formatting.
I tried setting the chart's X-axis type to "date axis" and I chose "months" as the base unit.
This almost works, but the line graph ends up being kind of weird. Changing the chart type to histogram doesn't help much either. The individual sales are not "piled up" like I would but, instead, they're hidden one behind the other. Stacked histogram doesn't work either.
Any clue on how I can force excel to bucketize my data using only chart formatting? This can't be that hard...
Try creating a pivot chart, then grouping the dates by month (right-click a date in the pivot table, and click "Group by... Month".
If you want to group by Years as well - hold down the Ctrl Key whilst you select the Month (both categories will then show up)
I have a set of data in a pivot table with date times and events. I've made a pivot chart with this data, and grouped the data by day and year, then display a count of events for each day. So, my horizontal axis goes from 19 March 2007 to 11 May 2010, and my vertical axis is numeric, going from zero to 140.
For some days, I have zero events. These days don't seem to be shown on the horizontal axis, so 2008 is narrower than 2009.
How do I display a count of zero for days with no events?
I'd like my horizontal axis to be continuous, so that it does not miss any days, and every month ends up taking up the same amount of horizontal space.
(This question is similar to the unanswered question here, but I'd rather not generate a table of all the days in the last x number of years just to get a smooth plot!)
What Douglas said pointed me in the right direction, but what I did was in the pivot table, right=-click on a date, and clicked on field settings, layout and print, and checked "show items with no data". This is in Excel '07, btw.
Select an cell in the data series, on the Pivot Table Options tab, click on Setting for this field, click on the second tab, Layout, then check the "Show labels for missing data" option. This seems to do the job - to the extent of including a Feb 29 for every year. Need to investigate that one some more.