setting up series from flattened recordset

[wordracr]

I have data that comes back from a database in this format, but when I go to setup the chart series (products), it tries to make a separate grouping for each combination of Product+Date.

I want products as the series, date as the category and Val as the value. Is this possible from this format or am I going to need to loop through the data and put each product into a separate column?

Product__Usage Date________Val
A________10/8/2005_________4205
A________3/4/2007__________4303
B________10/8/2005_________8979
B________10/15/2005________7171
C________10/22/2005________6251
C________10/29/2005________3955
C________11/5/2005_________5314

[oldchippy]

Use Data > Text to columns to split into separate cells

[wordracr]

I did not mean there were underscores in my data - that is just for easier reading. The data example is already in 3 columns.

[MrShorty]

I don't know the specifics for category type charts, because I only use XYscatter plots. If you're using an XY scatter plot, it should be easy enough. Assuming these are in A1:C8, The "A" data is X=B2:B3, Y=C2:C3. B data is X=B4:B5, Y=C4:C5, and so on.

If you need a category type chart, I'm not sure how it's going to handle the fact that the X data aren't the same for each data series. In this case, you may have to parse the data so that the entire X series is in one column, and data for each product are in separate columns, with blanks for the dates lacking data.