Click on the date column of the breadsheet, click on insert line graph and I get a chart which is rubbish. Do it again, same result. Maybe I need to include a column for the serial number, and select two columns rather than just the one. Still rubbish. What on earth is going on? This is a chart which I have produced several times before, and I must have produced hundreds of line charts over the years.
Has there been some cunning change in the charts part of the Excel world?
Should I try help? I do try help, but it is not very helpful. Google does turn up anything of use either.
This is now more than half an hour since I started and I am starting to get a bit irritated.
When, all of a sudden, for no particular reason, I notice that there is an error in the date at around row 350. I have tried to make the day in the month 45, with the result that Excel does not recognise this date as a date, knocking on all the way to the rubbish I started out with, without any kind of warning that maybe sir overlooked a little problem at row 350. Maybe Cortana is not as bright as she is cracked up to be.
Correct the date, having to guess between 4 and 5 at this remove in time, and all is well.
I now try to recover my poise by being clever. Is the line I get a straight line? Is the rate of baking steady over time, or does it speed up and slow down with the phases of the moon, the ambient temperature or whatever?
At which point I discover that I have no idea how to do this on a chart, short of taking half a day to write some visual basic code which does something complicated with date fields and computes intervals in days between dates, something that the visual basic DateDiff function is actually quite good at. And as I type this, I start to come clear on how to write the code, at least on one way to write it, and to get it down to maybe an hour or so. But it is not going to happen. I shall stick with being irritated.
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