Date Range in Excel Bar Chart

[tlwtheq]

I made an excel workbook with rows for Node Name, Functionality, Start Date, End Date.

Each column represents an event.

The dates range from 04/09/2014 - 12/15/2014.

When I select all the data and insert a horizontal bar chart Excel chooses a start date of 11/22/2013,
and an end date of 02/15/2015. How does this even make sense?

Thanks in advance.

TW

[teylyn]

Hello,

what do you want the chart to show? Using the dates as values in a horizontal bar chart does not make much sense. Could it be that you want to show a bar for the duration of each event?

In this case you need to calculate the difference in days and use a stacked horizontal bar chart with Start and duration as the two stacked series.

Excel will always adjust the value axis so the lowest and highest number on the axis extend beyond the values of the data points in both directions. How it arrives at these particular dates, I don't know, but I see the same dates for minimum and maximum.

You can edit the value axis and manually set the minimum and maximum values. The problem with dates on the value axis is that they don't increment nicely in months, since months have different number of days.