Simple question: Plot column with text vs column with values

**Morridini** · 11-10-2014, 07:27 AM

Hi.

I thought this would be really, really simple, but for some reason I never manage to get the results I want.

In my worksheet I have a distribution of letter grades like so:

F 0 0 310
E 56 35 0
D 64 40 0
C 96 60 0
B 128 80 0
A 144 90 0

Only the first and fourth column is of importance here. The first column is the grade, the fourth column is the number of students who got that grade (all Fs now as grading has not begun, just setting up the excel document now). In the end I simply want a plot with F-A on the x-axis, and the number of students who got that grade on the Y-axis, I don't really care if this is a histogram, scatter plot or whatnot.

Every time I do this it assumes that the first column each contains their own line, even though I carefully put in column 1 as the x-axis...

Any help will be much appreciated.

Cheers.

**MrShorty** · 11-10-2014, 11:57 AM

It can be hard to understand your dilemma without an example.

Here's what I did:

copy your data to a spreadsheet. Text to columns to separate data into columns
Select column A and column D
Insert -> Line Chart -> clustered lines with markers -- Excel automatically used column A for the X/Category axis data and Column D as the Y/value axis data, which sounds like exactly what you want. Can you post an example of what you are doing and what is wrong with the result?

**Morridini** · 11-10-2014, 03:25 PM

You know what, everything works fine if you select the columns and THEN insert the charts, but what I did (using Excel on Mac) was inserting the chart and then choosing the columns and then it did not work...

This sounds like a bug, but I now got it working, thanks mate.

**Jon_Peltier** · 11-11-2014, 12:24 PM

If the active cell is within the data range when you insert a chart, Excel uses the whole region of data that contains the active cell. It should still use the text values in the first column as X values, but it would also use all three columns of numbers as Y values.

If Excel somehow used the letters as Y values, you could always delete that series from the chart, by selecting and deleting it, or in the same dialog where you set the X values.