Lines on chart don't correlate to values being charted

[BW]

I'm having a strange problem with a chart done in Excel 2003 (on a workbook
prepared by someone other than myself, so I'm not sure of all that has
happened with it before.) There are three lines drawn on the chart, and one
is normal - that is, the line drawn correlates to the values being charted.
But the other two lines don't correlate to the numbers they should be
charting. When you hover over these two lines and it tells you the values
for the data point, the data point values are fine - but that isn't what the
line is drawing! For example, one series is charting 30 numbers with the
lowest being $1,100 and the highest being $134,000 - but line is being drawn
as a straight line at about $320,000!! A similar problem is occuring with
the second line. The series is charting numbers that range from $1,300 to
$24,000, but the line drawn is going from about $320,000 down to $180,000 (so
both the amounts and the direction of the line are way off.) Any ideas what
could be causing this strange problem? Thanks for any help you can give.

[Andy Pope]

Hi,

Are those 2 series being plotted on the secondary axis?
Double click one of the lines and check the setting on the Axes tab.
If they are then you need to check the values of the secondary axis scale.

Cheers
Andy

BW wrote:
> I'm having a strange problem with a chart done in Excel 2003 (on a workbook
> prepared by someone other than myself, so I'm not sure of all that has
> happened with it before.) There are three lines drawn on the chart, and one
> is normal - that is, the line drawn correlates to the values being charted.
> But the other two lines don't correlate to the numbers they should be
> charting. When you hover over these two lines and it tells you the values
> for the data point, the data point values are fine - but that isn't what the
> line is drawing! For example, one series is charting 30 numbers with the
> lowest being $1,100 and the highest being $134,000 - but line is being drawn
> as a straight line at about $320,000!! A similar problem is occuring with
> the second line. The series is charting numbers that range from $1,300 to
> $24,000, but the line drawn is going from about $320,000 down to $180,000 (so
> both the amounts and the direction of the line are way off.) Any ideas what
> could be causing this strange problem? Thanks for any help you can give.

--

Andy Pope, Microsoft MVP - Excel
http://www.andypope.info