Add Time Increments to Plot

**WolfpackAttack** · 07-14-2011, 03:07 PM

Hey all,

Is there any way to add say, 60 second increments, to a plot?

I've got a plot of about 10 minutes long with timestamps on the x-axis, and I was wondering if there was any way to illustrate 1 minute intervals or something along those lines.

Thanks a lot!

**Jon_Peltier** · 07-14-2011, 03:17 PM

Do you mean you want to adjust the tick spacing so it's one tick every 60 seconds?

In Excel 2003 and earlier you can enter your axis scale parameters in time format, so for something that goes from 0:00:00 to 0:10:00, you could enter 0 as minimum and 0:10 (or 0:10:00) as max, and then 0:1 (or 0:01:00) for one minute intervals.

Excel 2007 broke this functionality, and in 2010 it's still broken. But you can convert time to fraction in the worksheet. Enter 0:10:00 (for max) in a cell and 0:01:00 (for spacing) in another. Then change the cells' number format to General, so 10 minutes becomes 0.00694444 and 1 minute becomes 0.000694444. Enter these into the axis scale parameter boxes.

You can format the axis tick labels as times as well.

**WolfpackAttack** · 07-14-2011, 04:42 PM

I don't mean changing the tick intervals to 60 seconds, I want to place markers on the graph that indicate 60 second gaps without any relation to the data. More so for demonstration purposes rather than modifying the data itself..

Any ideas?

**Jon_Peltier** · 07-14-2011, 06:02 PM

Sure, add another series to the chart, with markers at the X values you want (every ten seconds) and a reasonable Y value. I suggest you use different markers than the real data uses, to avoid confusion.