Thread: Charting data over time

Not sure if there's an easy way to do this, but here goes...

Let's say I have a column of times, and a column of data points (altitude numbers in my case). I want to make a chart of altitude over time.
*But*, there's a catch: I have series of rows with time values & recorded altitudes, but not only are there gaps in the rows, the intervals aren't consistent (it's nominally one row per minute, but it's not *exactly* one minute).

So just making a simple line graph won't work, because by default Excel doesn't know that to do with the X-axis data in terms of normalizing it. But it seems to me this is the kind of "problem" others encounter that probably have a solution (which may involve something other than Excel, but don't let that stop you )

Brad

I'll have to play with that a bit more. What I ended up doing, since the data was *supposed* to be in increments of 1 minute, is insert rows for the missing minutes, and massage a bit (due to the nature of the data, precision beyond 1 minute isn't required). I came up with satisfactory results, but I'm going to revisit and look more closely with scatter plats as a learning exercise.

Thanks for the pointer.

Brad.

Scatterplots are definitely the way to go -- it bears directly on the physical situation. If various times are missing, the graph interpolates altitudes between them. And no need to insert rows for missing data.

Outstanding! I thought my "solution" was a bit of a hack anyway. It's always good to learn new things. :-)

Thanks;
Brad.