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Multi Line Graph with series that have inconsistent X axis values

  1. #1
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    11-01-2009
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    Ontario, Canada
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    Excel 2010
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    Multi Line Graph with series that have inconsistent X axis values

    Hi I'm trying to put together a line graph with 6 data series but am running into some problems due to inconsistent values in the X axis.

    My data involves sales information for 6 salesmen. I want my X axis to represent time and the Y axis to represent cumulative sales. I want to have a line/series for each member of the sales team plotting their cumulative sales over time. The cumulative sales total is calculated every day that a sale is made by that member. The problem is that all sales data does not occur on the same day. For some days there are multiple sales, other days no sales, and for some days one or two individuals made sales. I'm pretty inexperienced with Excel graphing but am assuming there's got to be a way around this. I think that I might need to rearrange my data into horizontal columns, but if I were to do that I would have many empty cells (since not every salesman made a sale on every date). Plus, it would take a very long time to manually input each cell value in the right place.

    Here is an example of the data (sorted by date): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5685397/graphexample.xlsx

    Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

  2. #2
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    11-01-2009
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    Excel 2010
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    33

    Re: Multi Line Graph with series that have inconsistent X axis values

    I never ended up getting this question answered (in the end my wife plotted the data in R).

    But recently I asked a similar question again here: http://www.excelforum.com/excel-char...ml#post3502404

    Turns out the answer is remarkably simple. It doesn't matter if the X values are inconsistent. Just make sure the column which contains the X values contains ALL the values, regardless of whether there are duplicates. Then make sure the columns which contain the various Y lines (I had six of them) contain ONLY the data that should be on each individual line. There will end up being both many duplicate values in the column that contains the X values, as well as many null cells in the columns that contain each of the Y lines, but it doesn't matter. Excel will sort it out. Simple.

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