Change the series order in a chart
Transcript of the video:
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Excel Charts, Chapter 1-The Select Data Dialog.
Oh hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
We're working through the examples in the Excel Charts and Graphs book, yeah.
Just one example from each chapter.
So, the book covers a lot more than what we're doing here.
But I figured, it'd be interesting to take, you know, one topic in each chapter and kind of demonstrate it here in the video. So, we're talking about, we're creating charts and we need to change the data, that's in the charts.
So I want to create a 2-d column chart here and the first thing you see is that Excel decides because there's five cities and four months that they're going to put the cities across the bottom.
And that's not what I want.
I want to have the cities over here in the legend.
So, that's really easy to do with the Switch Row/Column.
So, this is on the Chart Tools > Design.
Choose Switch Row/Column and that gets the cities over in the legend and then the months going across the bottom.
Okay now, as I look at this I want to arrange the data in order by January temperature and we're almost there.
It's just a matter of taking Adelaide and moving it after Darwin and then everything will be a nice sequence there.
I'm going to show you how to do that using Select Data.
All right, with Select Data we can take an entry and then use these up and down arrows to move it.
So, I'm going to take Adelaide and move that down.
So, we have Alice Springs, Darwin, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney and so, now you see that I have a nice flow there in January.
You know, we can see a lot, so you see, it doesn't seem to follow that pattern in the other seasons.
Always good to take one of your data points and put it in order so we, we can compare it to the others.
All right, now the other thing we have here, this is Australia obviously, and so January is summer and July is winter.
I want to make that very clear to people and so, I'd like to change these headings.
I could change them in the chart but let's take a look at how to do that in the Select Data dialog, here where we have our various categories.
I'm going to click Edit and you'll see that right now, it's coming from a range on the worksheet but we can change that, I'm gonna leave the equal sign there and then type a left curly brace and then, in quotes.
So, January is summer in Australia.
A comma to go to the next value then fall or autumn, whichever you prefer, winter and then finally spring.
Now, you have to close that with a closing curly brace.
Click Ok.
Click OK and now we've managed to change the labels that are being used there along the axis.
Now normally, you would change this data here in the underlying data set but sometimes, we don't want to change that data set.
It might be someone else's data or we're linking to another Workbook and we don't want to, you know, change that data.
So, it's nice to know that using Switch Row/Column and the Select data options, we can change that to...
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Excel Charts, Chapter 1-The Select Data Dialog.
Oh hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
We're working through the examples in the Excel Charts and Graphs book, yeah.
Just one example from each chapter.
So, the book covers a lot more than what we're doing here.
But I figured, it'd be interesting to take, you know, one topic in each chapter and kind of demonstrate it here in the video. So, we're talking about, we're creating charts and we need to change the data, that's in the charts.
So I want to create a 2-d column chart here and the first thing you see is that Excel decides because there's five cities and four months that they're going to put the cities across the bottom.
And that's not what I want.
I want to have the cities over here in the legend.
So, that's really easy to do with the Switch Row/Column.
So, this is on the Chart Tools > Design.
Choose Switch Row/Column and that gets the cities over in the legend and then the months going across the bottom.
Okay now, as I look at this I want to arrange the data in order by January temperature and we're almost there.
It's just a matter of taking Adelaide and moving it after Darwin and then everything will be a nice sequence there.
I'm going to show you how to do that using Select Data.
All right, with Select Data we can take an entry and then use these up and down arrows to move it.
So, I'm going to take Adelaide and move that down.
So, we have Alice Springs, Darwin, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney and so, now you see that I have a nice flow there in January.
You know, we can see a lot, so you see, it doesn't seem to follow that pattern in the other seasons.
Always good to take one of your data points and put it in order so we, we can compare it to the others.
All right, now the other thing we have here, this is Australia obviously, and so January is summer and July is winter.
I want to make that very clear to people and so, I'd like to change these headings.
I could change them in the chart but let's take a look at how to do that in the Select Data dialog, here where we have our various categories.
I'm going to click Edit and you'll see that right now, it's coming from a range on the worksheet but we can change that, I'm gonna leave the equal sign there and then type a left curly brace and then, in quotes.
So, January is summer in Australia.
A comma to go to the next value then fall or autumn, whichever you prefer, winter and then finally spring.
Now, you have to close that with a closing curly brace.
Click Ok.
Click OK and now we've managed to change the labels that are being used there along the axis.
Now normally, you would change this data here in the underlying data set but sometimes, we don't want to change that data set.
It might be someone else's data or we're linking to another Workbook and we don't want to, you know, change that data.
So, it's nice to know that using Switch Row/Column and the Select data options, we can change that to...
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
