bubble trubble - problems creating/maintaining/labelling bubble ch

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Guest

I have a few questions relating to bubble charts - if anyone can help I would be very grateful

1) when I select a range of data and make a bubble chart out of it (using either the wizard or pressing f11) excel seems to have a fit - when I look at source data>series the ranges are all wrong and so I have to manually change every one individually. I am charting from a very simple table col 1=labels, col2=x values, col3=yvalues and col4=bubble size

Am I setting up the source range in the wrong way, or is this just a 'feature' of excel? (I am using excel 97 sr-2 @ work, but have tried this on my own pc using office 2000 and it does the same thing)

2) I am using the excellent x-y chart labeller addd-in (from appspro.com) to display label names next to the bubbles, but find that I have to assign them all individually - is there any way to get all bubbles labelled at once? To get around this when setting up new charts I have tried to duplicate existing finished charts by copying worksheet containing datasheet and chart, but if I have used the x-y chart labeller the dreaded Dr.Watson appears and Excel crashes!

3) Finally - can anyone tell me if there's a way to get Excel to recognise when the size of a data range changes and only chart live data? eg I have to build lots of similar charts, but the amount of rows will vary (they are populated by software which extracts from a live database) Otherwise I have to review each one manually every time I update to check that there are no extra rows needed in the source data range (which is a pain in the arse)

Ideally I am looking for an answer that does not involve VB (since I don't know it!)

Many thanks in advance for ANY support!

cheers

Griff
 
Hi Griff -

1. Don't include the labels column in the selected data, because Excel
doesn't know what to do with them. Just X, Y, and bubble size.

2. The Chart Labeler labels an entire series all at once. If your bubble
chart has several series, you will have to do them all. I suspect your
data problems in (1) may have led to Excel plotting each bubble as its
own series.

3. You can use dynamic ranges to produce dynamic charts. There are
several examples and links on my web site:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/Dynamics.html

BTW, Dr. Watson is less of an integrated feature of later versions of
Excel.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______
 
You were right - my chart has a different series on each row (!) so I will have to keep on linking them individually or find a workaround

but your comments have been a real help and after following the links to your site I think I have also answered a bunch of other questions, so THANKS!
 
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