Hi Tim -

I never saw this post until the flood in your RSS feed this morning. The video is good, it’s well planned and clearly done.

However, you can get the added data more quickly using copy/paste and sorting, which I showed in my blog recently, Line Chart vs. Steep Chart. You can also use a line chart and retain its better time axis formatting.

No problem with the flood, gave me a chance to catch up. You have some good posts, so I’ve added you to my blogroll.

I used to steer clear of line charts. Then I realized how well they can represent the date axis. Try to make a daily XY chart that has an axis label at the first of each month: can’t do it using the actual axis ticks, though of course you can fake it with a dummy series.

In the process I learned how to get around limitations of line chart, by, for example, using a line series for the first series of a chart, and XY for all the rest. Of course, Excel 2007 breaks the way the XY series’ dates are plotted along the date axis. Sometimes I get the feeling that the team working on Excel 2007 don’t use Excel the way the users do.

I do have a post in the works dealing with XY vs Line charts, to go with several pages in my web site. Of course, I have about 50 in-progress posts or ideas for posts, so there’s no predicting when it will hit the net.

I should point out that I use line charts only in two cases:

1. I want to make use of the date features of the category axis.

2. It’s a combination chart with area or column types.

Otherwise I almost invariably use an XY chart.

Great article. This will go a long way in helping me out.!