The axis shows an accurate distribution of the data. Now it's clear that the stock price data is plotted across the date range, and the data points don't necessarily line up with the dates in the axis. It'll be easier to see what's happening if I add data labels and drop lines to the chart.

This is a little strange and maybe even confusing. Notice since we have a large date range, the interval is set to 1 year, and all dates are January 1. You can see category in the name, and if I open the format task pane to axis options, you can see Excel is using the Automatic setting, which, since we have valid dates, means we have options for minimum and maximum dates, as well as date intervals. If plot this stock price data as a line chart, the horizontal axis is automatically set up as a category axis with a type of 'date'. When you create a chart using valid dates on a horizontal axis, Excel automatically sets the axis type to date.įor example, this stock price data is spaced out over a period of more than 10 years, in random intervals. Here we use linear interpolation to estimate the sales at 21 ☌.In this video, we'll look at an example of how Excel plots dates on a horizontal axis. Interpolation is where we find a value inside our set of data points. Example: Sea Level RiseĪnd here I have drawn on a 'Line of Best Fit'.

Try to have the line as close as possible to all points, and as many points above the line as below.īut for better accuracy we can calculate the line using Least Squares Regression and the Least Squares Calculator. We can also draw a 'Line of Best Fit' (also called a 'Trend Line') on our scatter plot: It is now easy to see that warmer weather leads to more sales, but the relationship is not perfect. Here are their figures for the last 12 days: Ice Cream Sales vs TemperatureĪnd here is the same data as a Scatter Plot: The local ice cream shop keeps track of how much ice cream they sell versus the noon temperature on that day. (The data is plotted on the graph as ' Cartesian (x,y) Coordinates') Example: In this example, each dot shows one person's weight versus their height. A Scatter (XY) Plot has points that show the relationship between two sets of data.

How to plot a graph in excel x vs y