Help with Axis on a Timeline

If you go back to Andy Pope's spreadsheet from the other thread (the template that you started with), you will not that his data series are both XY scatter type, where your data series are Line and Column. You will need your data series to be XY scatter, with Time (column B) for X data, and columns D or E for the Y data -- just like Andy's original.

The other thread mentioned Rob Bovey's XY chart labeler add-in. you will probably need this to add the "milestones" into each data label. I would probably start over from Andy Pope's template:

1) Download and Install Rob Bovey's add-in.
2) Open template, delete data labels from current chart.
3) Add and format data points and label text to existing table.
4) Using the "Add labels" command from the add-in, add the desired data labels to the chart.

Originally Posted by Chris_PLP

Thx for the quick reply MrShorty!
Unfortunately the XY chart label add-in will not label the axis. It replaces the milestone label with the time entries. I may well be doing it wrong.

That would be my guess, as well. I expect you need to practice using the add-in. I usually find myself deleting the old data labels, then adding in new data labels using the add-in. It should be as easy as selecting column C for the data labels.

Also Andy Pope's SS graphics have error bars overlapping the red dots. I had to remove them all together in order to achieve an acceptable look. I googled around for the fix but it seems it requires a VB code fix which is way over my head.

I'm not sure why you would need to delete the error bars. I expect it would just be a matter of formatting the length of the error bars to a more suitable value. (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...159.aspx?CTT=1) You may need something other than percentage, and maybe you will want to calculate the length in the spreadsheet and use "custom" for the error bar length. Error bars seem like the easiest way to get this effect -- it should just be a matter of formatting them the way you want.

Also, since the axis is a decimal range, it requires a lot of tweaking just to get my starting and ending point to be somewhat close.

This is one of the challenges of using date/time on a scatter plot. It often requires a little trial and error -- it will probably help a lot to review how Excel handles dates/times (http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datetime.htm).

After the 12th milestone, the table's data is not transferred to the timeline. I double checked the links and they seem to be okay, but that's not saying a whole lot from my inexperienced view.

I would guess you just need to extend the source data for the chart series to include all rows. You can use the "select data" dialog to see what the source ranges are for each data series and change them as needed.

I wish i could take my existing SS and transfer its data to a scatter plot axis so that the intervals would be accurately represented.

that's exactly what we are trying to do here. It should be doable, but there is admittedly a lot of "non-standard" formatting for someone who is "inexperienced".

Keep asking questions and we'll try and help as best we can.