Making Graphs

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Making Graphs

Postby pappy1 » Mon Dec 21, 2009 7:05 pm

Apple works was not as fast but much simpler. I sometimes think that the designers went overboard on glitz! However her is my problem

I am trying to make a graph, a single line chart, however all I get are the fancy point markers. Even more important I am trying to make a chart with a y axis range of 50 to 150. After setting that range in the inspector all I get is 1.00 to 150.0. I cannot eliminate the decimal point!

I also have difficulty in displaying the x axis values. I am trying to establish a reading (y axis) for each day of the month (x axis). All I get in the x axis is an opaque stream of numbers that I cannot edit. This si so fundamental that I am sure that I am overlooking something that is not obvious to me. It's great when you highlight the data you want to chart, hit chart and presto there it is in it's useless glory....help
pappy1
 
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Re: Making Graphs

Postby Barry » Tue Dec 22, 2009 4:04 am

pappy1 wrote :
> I am trying to make a graph, a single line chart, however all I get are the
> fancy point markers. Even more important I am trying to make a chart with a
> y axis range of 50 to 150. After setting that range in the inspector all I
> get is 1.00 to 150.0. I cannot eliminate the decimal point!
>
> I also have difficulty in displaying the x axis values. I am trying to
> establish a reading (y axis) for each day of the month (x axis). All I get
> in the x axis is an opaque stream of numbers that I cannot edit. This si so
> fundamental that I am sure that I am overlooking something that is not
> obvious to me. It's great when you highlight the data you want to chart,
> hit chart and presto there it is in it's useless glory....help

HI Pappy,

I've run up a scatter graph, days 1-31 on the X axis and whole number values in the range 56 to 149 (all whole number values). The inspector accepted integer values of 50 and 150 for the minimum and maximum on the Y axis, and automatically set the number of steps to 4.

Did you have any Y values in your table that fell outside the range? That could include any cells where no data had been entered, although when I experimented with deleting data from a cell, my chart simply left a gap in the lines connecting the data points. Entering an out of range value resulted in the lines to that data point disappearing at the bottom or top of the chart, as appropriate. There was no change to the Y axis labels.

X axis labels automatically set to 0-40 with four steps, and labeled 0, 10, 20 and 40. Labels were also integers for 1, 2, 5, 8 and 10 steps. Any other number of steps resulted in labels that included a decimal part.

Changing the X axis maximum to 31 generated a horde of decimals as would be expected (31 is a prime number, so a 0-31 range has no whole number factors other than 1 (not too useful) and 31 (beyond the maximum 10 steps for a Numbers chart axis).

But changing the X axis minimum from auto to 1 gives a data set with only 30 steps. Setting the number of steps to any factor of 30 less than or equal to 10 will result in integer labels for the X axis.

Regards,
Barry
Barry
 
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Joined: Mon Sep 30, 2002 12:54 am
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