Comments on: Data Sets

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:16:00 +0000

I've written a tutorial showing how to make Category Labels That Don't Overlap the Data. Thanks for the inspiration.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:20:00 +0000

Oh, and Dick, it's easy to turn your chart into an image file. Remove the border, then use the Enhanced Export Chart Procedure technique, or scroll to the bottom of the page and download my little utility (it's free!).

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:17:00 +0000

Brad -

Allowing bars to start at a value other than zero is a sin.

Chip's method is one of the accepted techniques, and yes, it works in 2007 as well. Despite my many rants, they didn't totally break 2007.

I've decided to write a blog post on another way to get nice axis labels in a bar chart when some values are positive and others negative. Maybe it'll run tomorrow, maybe next week.

By: Rob van Gelder

Rob van Gelder — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:52:00 +0000

I couldn't stand the thought of outliving my wife.
For this reason alone, I will not travel to Bangladesh.

By: chip

chip — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:18:00 +0000

Isn't the overlap just a matter of changing the Tick Mark Labels for the X-Axis to "Low"?

If you're on 2007, I couldn't tell you.

By: Brad Yundt

Brad Yundt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:53:00 +0000

Men live longer than women in Bangladeshso you are trying to chart a number that is less than zero. If you don't want the bar to overlap the country name, then you need to move the origin of the bars to -1. You can do this by right-clicking the Value axis (on the bottom of your chart), choosing Format Axis from the pop-up, going to the Scale tab, then specifying that the Category (X) axis crosses at -1.

Though the overlap problem is fixed, I think that the appearance of the resulting bars is somewhat misleading.

Brad Yundt