Excel Graphs

sarahwilson

Can anyone help me with an excel graph question? I know how to create them but I need to create on with 73 lines of data and its too little to read as a bar graph and pie chart. Whats the best type of chart to use for this data or will I have to split the data into 2 graphs to make it more readable?

A-Vic

sarahwilson wrote: »

Can anyone help me with an excel graph question? I know how to create them but I need to create on with 73 lines of data and its too little to read as a bar graph and pie chart. Whats the best type of chart to use for this data or will I have to split the data into 2 graphs to make it more readable?

Not to good on these but couldnt you use a pivot table?

sarahwilson

I'm not familiar with pivot tables, is it possible to put more data on them? I'll have a quick sniff round in excel see what I can come up with - thanks for the idea:thumbup:

A-Vic

sarahwilson wrote: »

I'm not familiar with pivot tables, is it possible to put more data on them? I'll have a quick sniff round in excel see what I can come up with - thanks for the idea:thumbup:

as i understand them they are used to present and concentrate large amounts of data for reporting data, heres a link:-

http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=18517

sarahwilson

Thanks for that thats really helpful:thumbup:

sarahwilson

Actually I could do with asking another excel question whilst I'm at it!!

I want to compare sales by qty and value per month to each other on 2 seperate line graphs, how do I do a comparative graph?

CJC

I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing you mean but with line graphs


If it is, then it's really a matter of placing two separate graphs on the same worksheet and arseing about with formatting, size and alignment until it looks about right. I don't know of an easier way of doing it.

sarahwilson

Thanks CJC that will do nicely:thumbup:

mark130273

pivot tables................haahahahahaha they are aa awaste of time ?lol

Buff

I'd say Pivit tables are the best way to go - if you're using more than 20 data points then you should use pivots. They're easy to make and you can add data at any time.

I understood your other question differenlty to Chris - I read it as you were looking for a way to have to bars per month on the same graph.
This again is relatively easy.
Just select the data you want to put into a graph, you can have multiple series on a graph.

Hint - if your data per month is not directly adjacent to one another, you can select data which is far apart by using the ctrl button. Hold it in and you can highlight one section then move to another section and start another click-drag highlight.

If you have any excel questions - bash 'em to me or chris... we get sad and almost climax at excel problems :-)

Gem7321

I have a VBA question (I think) if anyone can help?

I've got a spreadsheet and if I select 'No' in a drop down I've created I want a pop up to appear with a message - how do I do that?!

Thank you :001_smile:

blobbyh

I'm gonna assume you just want a short and simple message to appear next to your "No" field Gem - we'll call it cell A4 - in which case I'd just use =IF(A4="No","Your message text here"," ") and combine it with conditional formatting e.g. red bold size 14 to make it stand out. Nothing will show unless "No" is displayed.

For a pop up balloon - if it can be done in Excel - Jamie and Chris will be your men...

CJC

Now, I'll admit to being a bit ring-rusty having not done any Excel coding for some time so I might be talking out of my arse here, but this seems to be a bit curious even by Microsoft standards.

It all sounds easy enough; add an on_click event handler to the combo box that checks what's been selected and displays a message box if that's "no", right?

Well,sort of...

There are actually two kinds of combo box you can put on a worksheet. The one you'd generally use is from the Forms toolbar, which you populate from the properties dialogue nice and easy. Problem is from a code point of view this isn't a combo box at all but rather a "drop down" object. Now, though drops downs are clearly part of Excel, from Microsoft's point of view they don't exist, there's no help entries for them or any kind of coding support. Moreover they seem to require some complex coding that I can't figure out.

Conversely, you can put a combo box from the controls toolbar on the worksheet. Much nicer to code up and works pretty much as expected. Problem here is that as far as I can tell you pretty much have to do all you want to do in code. You can't easily populate the box or set it's properties except through code.

So,basically we have one combo box that's worksheet friendly but hard to code and one that's worksheet unfriendly but easy to code. Gee thanks, Microsoft.

Gem7321

Sorry Chris but you may as well be speaking Japenese!

I've gone for the if formula - thanks Rob. I was gonna use data validation but then the message comes up whenever the cell is selected so isn't much good really.

Thank yous

CJC

Translation: It's too hard and/or I'm too thick.

Buff

Deleted as my advice turned out to be rubbish!

I tried it out myself and got nothing. Will hve another stab at it later on.