Thread: Unusual Excel Chart in PowerPoint Behavior

I have an Excel chart that has an X axis like this:

Jan-09
Feb-09
...
Nov-09

When I paste this into a PowerPoint presentation, looks great.

When I save and reopen the presentation, the dates have been replaced with:

Dec-04
Jan-05
...
Oct-05

If I right click on the chart and click 'Edit Data" the dates immediately revert back to being correct.

But I have no idea where it's getting those 2004-2005 dates from. They don't appear anywhere either in the presentation or the orginal Excel workbook.

The only other thing I can see that is a bit unusual is that in the Excel Workbook, the axis is formatted as "Text Axis" and in PowerPoint it comes through as "Automatically Select based on data." That said, even after I changed it to Text Axis, the problem persists.

It repeats every time. If I click "Edit Data" it fixes it. Then I save. Then I exit and go back in... broke again.

I'm going to try creating the whole thing from scratch (the chart is rather small) and see if that fixes it... but even if it does I still wonder how this is even possible and where those dates are coming from.

I am as stumped as I've ever been by this.