August 5, 2005

Aghast

I want to create a chart in Excel, plotting a changing number against a time axis, with one point every hour, more or less, over the course of a bunch of days.

This doesn't work: Excel plots every 1-Jun point at the center of 1-Jun whether it's 6:00 AM or 3:00 PM. My 678 point series taken over 30 days bunches my data together in 30 x-values.

This is unbearably frustrating, and I fuck with it for a while, eventually finding this:

Time-scale charts and times: You can't create time-scale charts from data that is measured at intervals of hours, minutes, or seconds. Only days, months, and years are considered base units in time-scale charts.

The degree to which I am boggling is not easily captured in language. Suffice it to say that my reaction is both blasphemous and scatological.

I'm sorry, I mean, what the fuck is wrong with these people? I can't make any time series graph more finely grained than one day? In two sentences, they've ensured that I can never use Excel for time series graphs.

Back to gnuplot, I suppose. I hope it can handle dates.

Posted by Greg at August 5, 2005 12:14 PM

Comments
#1 ::: Mason ::: August 5, 2005 4:38 PM ::: link

How hard would it be to convert minutes to days and make Excel work for you in spite of itself?

Wait, what am I saying? Screw the Microsoft bugware. There has to be something better.