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excelexcel-charts

Excel Line Chart with separate data points for a single line

I have a weird problem that google's not being too kind on results (mostly basic things on how to create a line chart, or combination charts, neither of which I'm after).

I'm trying to automate a report we do each month, I've managed pretty well so far by having a linked excel chart and objects, I have a single sheet in excel I paste my formatted data (set format is consistent each month) then excel picks out the data, creates the charts and when opening powerpoint it reads it all in from there.

Great! Until I was given a new piece of information, there's monthly data and a yearly tally in my data, monthly data is shown with a particular "weighting" applied, year with a different one and it's this that's caused a problem.

The package that's exporting the data can't show these figures contiguously, so we have an export with all the monthly weights, then with annual weights.

So say originally we were looking at C83 to O83 for our data for this year, we're now looking at C83 to N83 and O1364.

I've tried to look at how I would add this to the chart, which currently has the reference:

='Monthly Data to Update'!$C$83:$O$83

But doing anything + or & doesn't seem to work.

So, I decided to just pull all my data in to contiguous set to reference, (so ='Monthly Data to Update'!C83 one cell, ='Monthly Data to Update'!C84 next cell and so on).

This caused a problem for future months that're empty, having 0's in them, so I updated my code to check:

=IF('Monthly Data to Update'!C83=0,NA(),'Monthly Data to Update'!C83)

And this works, my table below my chart is blank for the empty months, my chart doesn't try and plot these empty months. Hurrah!

Now, the wrinkle. The Yearly nets aren't charted but are displayed in the table (I'm not up on Excel charts so how this was originally setup, I just copied the charts from Powerpoint in to Excel and reset the data to where it needed to be before copying it back to Powerpoint as a data linked chart).

First chart I did, works fine, second chart I did it's decided to start plotting the annual net for two of the three lines = \

So, this is how my chart looks like, running off the contiguous (but wrong) data: wrong data, right layout

And this is how it looks running off the fetched contiguous (correct) data: enter image description here

It's really baffling, Exceeded and Met now plot the Year to Date figure, whereas Not Met behaves as it should, and they all have the same data layout (on the right) using the same formulas (just pointing at different cells).

I am confused..

I'm hoping to keep this light and simple so have avoided using any macro's to date, so that down the line when I hand this project over to someone any maintenance should be easy to do (say add a chart) without them asking me and me then having to remember what the hell I did a few months ago.. - so if this is doable without going down that line (which, seems like it should be, given my first chart the two lines there worked fine, and one of the three in this is behaving itself).

Apologies for the long winded description, I've given full history so if there's a step further back I could've done better, then happy to fix it up there rather than where I got to.

Solution

  • Ah, so apparently I could've had non-contiguous data with a comma, not a plus or ampersand, so the chart data would be:

    =('Monthly Data to Update'!$C$83:$N$83,'Monthly Data to Update'!$O$1404)

    So I don't need to rebuild the data in to a contiguous set, and my charts don't cock up when selecting the data this way, win's all around.

    Thank you for your time, hopefully this helps someone in the future. (as a saving grace for my lost morning)