Thread: Make it more simple or intuitive to do simple things

I appreciate the fact that applications are becoming more versatile and able
to do things that we hardly thought possible in the past but I feel that in
this added complexity you are losing sight of the need to do simple things
easily without resorting to trial and error or consulting "help" which often
anyhow doesn't lead one straight to the solution! An example is how to
produce a chart with a series of months i.e Jan Feb Mar etc appearing on the
X axis. This is no doubt something that resulted naturally in the first
versions of Excel charts or in a competitor's early (or present?) version.
Now when one comes to do this the numbers 1,2,3 etc appear. I eventually
learnt to first format this text to a date. There also seems to be no "how to
produce a chart" as such and one has to rely on a search word which may not
always correspond to Microsoft's nomenclature. Is it not time to consolidate
things into a more intuitive process to do what you need to without getting
lost? Thank you.

Hey Vernie -

Are you asking for specific help? This forum is predominantly "staffed" by
non-Microsoft volunteers. You could send your comments directly to Microsoft at
mswish@microsoft.com.

You could also pay a visit to our friend google.com, and do a search on, say, Excel
chart tutorial. You'd probably get a few thousand hits.

The particular difficulty you report can be helped by using a relatively
undocumented data arrangement. Put the X data (your months in this case) in a
column, and the different Y values in the next few columns. Put labels in the row
immediately above the Y values; these will be used in the chart as series names in
the legend. Leave the cell above the X values BLANK. This blank set the top row and
first column apart from the rest of the data, and Excel automatically uses these
special ranges for X data and series names.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______

Vernie wrote:

> I appreciate the fact that applications are becoming more versatile and able
> to do things that we hardly thought possible in the past but I feel that in
> this added complexity you are losing sight of the need to do simple things
> easily without resorting to trial and error or consulting "help" which often
> anyhow doesn't lead one straight to the solution! An example is how to
> produce a chart with a series of months i.e Jan Feb Mar etc appearing on the
> X axis. This is no doubt something that resulted naturally in the first
> versions of Excel charts or in a competitor's early (or present?) version.
> Now when one comes to do this the numbers 1,2,3 etc appear. I eventually
> learnt to first format this text to a date. There also seems to be no "how to
> produce a chart" as such and one has to rely on a search word which may not
> always correspond to Microsoft's nomenclature. Is it not time to consolidate
> things into a more intuitive process to do what you need to without getting
> lost? Thank you.