Can you plot text on a chart? And what if I don't want a y-axis?

This is going to sound odd, but I want to know if there is a way to make a sort of storyboard using Excel charts.

I would need the x-axis to be days and then scenes. For instance, Day 1 Scene 1, Day 1 Scene 2, Day 1 Scene 3, Day 2 Scene 1, Day 2 Scene 2, etc.

The chart's y-axis would be composed of characters and would consist entirely of a straight line with plot pointed on the line. They would have to be stacked, of course -- imagine a straight line along the 1, along the 2, along the 3. The only difference is the 1 would be Falchek and the 2 would be Kisten and the 3 would be Laid. Etc.

The problem, of course, is that I'd want to set boxes of text to appear at certain points instead of simple dots. And I have no idea if it is possible to make line charts that are stacked on top of each other like that. It's basically going to be straight lines running across the chart with random chunks of text plotted across the y-axis. And I don't know how to plot more than one point along a y-axis value, because certain scenes have more than one character, so I'd need a chunk of text for Laid and another for Keat plotted on the y-axis mark for Day 1, Scene 1.

Does any of this make sense?

Here is an image to show the sort of thing I'm trying to get at (obviously, red is Character 1 and blue is Character 2):

http://www.geocities.com/inpariswithyou/Image1.gif

Yes, I know. I spent six hours making an Excel spreadsheet to convert between the two different calendrical systems that I created for this novel. One calendar is based on a 363-day year that is divided into eleven thirty-three-day months while the other one uses a 360-day year divided into thirty-six ten-day months. The hardest part was figuring out all the math, but once I realized I need to create some sort of common ground between the two, it was cake.

Now, I'm just trying to figure this out. I realize that I technically don't need to make a chart, that I can just use a spreadsheet to much the same effect, but it's going to be a lot harder to plot things equidistantly. I wanted to see particularly if there were large clumps of certain characters at certain areas of the year: I don't want to have six scenes of one character within one week only to have that character drop off the face of the Earth for two or three months.

The problem, you see, is I have too many characters. Damn epics.

But in any case, I think it's an interesting question, whether or not you can have clumps of text plot on a chart instead of simple points. And also, what to do when your y-axis is a bit funkier than the usual one. :-)

The world may never know...

Originally Posted by Carim

Hi,

There is a simple way to replicate your chart, in an XL spreadsheet ...
Once you have positionned all your Text ...
Tools > Options > View
Clear Gridlines
- and if need be -
Clear Row & Column Headers

That's perfect! And you just showed me how to get rid of those pesky page breaks that appear if you click Print Preview! You didn't answer the question, really, but you found another way -- and probably an easier one -- to do just what I needed!

Thanks a bunch!