How to make N/A show up on a chart

A co-worker asked me for help with this and it seemed like an easy problem to help with, but I must be having some kind of brain fart or something.

I know when you use #N/A, it won't chart. I know when you use N/A, it will chart as a zero. Her question was, what can she type into the data so that the chart bar won't portray data for that metric, but the data label will read N/A (or something similar).

She wants to the people looking at the chart to see that there was no data point for that metric that week, but also see that the reason there was no data for that metric because there was none available for that week (the product didn't run through that data point that week).

I hope I'm explaining it correctly.

By the way, we are both using Excel 2007.

Update: She actually wants to be able to display N/A (or something similar) in the data table in the chart, not the data labels. I never use data tables in my charts, so nothing I'm trying is working.

How about displaying labels? I'd do this with custom number formatting: ",,,@" which do not display any numbers, but displays texts and error codes

Kaper,

I just found out that it isn't the data label that she wants to display the N/A, it's the data table within the chart that she want's to display the N/A.

I don't ever use data tables in my charts.

Any ideas?

You could use a custom number format. This only works if actual data does not contain negative values.

For data points to be displayed as N/A use data value of -1.
custom number format General;"N/A";General

The example also illustrates how the data table treats =NA() and #N/A data points