Possible to format x-axis to make most recent data more "spread out"?

[jphalverson]

I have 8 years of daily stock data that includes a line for the daily stock price and 2 moving average lines and it's getting harder and harder to differentiate between the lines at the current data point because of how compressed the chart is getting. Is there a way to make the last 30 days of data more "spread out" while maintaining the entire history of the data on the chart? It is a line chart that is using a date format for the x-axis.

 

[pgc01]

Hi
Welcome to the board

I'd use a scatter chart, where the X values (the dates) would be replaced by values that would be more spread out at the end.

For ex., let's say you have the dates 1-14 October, and you want the last 4 days more spread out.
In this case I'd use an auxiliary set of values like, for ex., 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,15,20,25,30 that would be my new X values.

In a scatter chart the difference between the X values is proportional to the horizontal distances between the points and so you'd get the last values more spread out.

Does this help?

 

[jphalverson]

That could work if I was only interested in seeing the last 30 days of data. I have over 1350 data points on the chart, one for each day I have updated the stock prices for the past 8 years. In looking around, there does not appear to be a way to make the most recent data stand out in the way I'm asking.

 

[pgc01]

Hi

Do a small test to see if this is not what you want.

Let's use 1000 points

Write in A1:A1000: 1, 2, 3, 4...990, 1000, 1010, 1020, ..., 1090
The first 990 are spaced 1 unit
The last 10 are spaced 10 units (you can also space them with 20 or 50 units to make them stand ever more out)

Write some values in B1:B1000

Now insert a scatter chart using A1:A1000 for X and B1:B1000 for Y.