Thanks Del.
you're spot-on.
"Deleting the straight line" revealed a bell curve. shape of this was not
the same as first nor second bell curves, so i'm assuming parameters got
mixed up.
can you give me a bit more instruction on "setting the y-scale to "Auto"
part?
You're all right, we know the scale is automatically resetting because
the curves sprang into view as soon as you deleted the big line that was
making your curves so flat that they were invisible down on the bottom
of the chart. My worry was that you might have set the Maximum of the y
scale, so that it stayed fixed, in which case deleting that straight
line would not have made the bell curves appear.
i'm also not familiar w/ "editing the series for X & Y ranges".
We'll deal with that in a little bit.
also, am i suppose to use the "Custom Types" of chart instead of "Standard
Types" w/in the Chart Wizard? if so, which one do i choose, since i didn't
see "XY (Scatter)" under the "Custom Types" menu.
XY (Scatter) is one of the standard types rather than a custom type, and
from your earlier post it sounds like you picked the right type (a very
common mistake is to choose "Line", which would be unsatisfactory for
this chart for a number of reasons).
I'm surprised to hear that neither of the shapes looks quite right to
you, as I'd hoped one of them would and the other one wouldn't. Let's
see if trying again works. After studying Tushar Mehta's tutorial...
http://www.tushar-mehta.com/
excel/charts/normal_distribution/#enumeration
....I think the best way to do this is not "editing series", which I
talked blithely about. I'm happy to do that by hand, but as you're a
charts newbie that's probably getting too deep for now. Instead, I'm
going to suggest using the "Add Data.." dialogue in the Charts menu.
After you followed the instructions the first time, you selected the
*whole* of the two columns B and C, and Excel detected just the cells it
needed to build the chart. I didn't even know it could do that, which is
why Tushar's a consultant and I'm just an amateur!
So build your second pair of columns that make up the second bell curve,
but instead of putting it right next to the first two to make a solid
block of B, C, D, and E, I want to put the second two columns at J and K
(that gives plenty of room to completely duplicate Tushar's original
scheme, still reading column A for the basic input, but using cells $N$1
and $P$1 for the mean and s.d., instead of $F$1 and $H$1).
When you've made the second pair of columns of data, instead of going to
the chart wizard to make a new chart (we've already got one) go to the
"Chart" menu up on the menu bar (if it's not there, make sure you have
the chart selected) and select Add Data...
When the dialogue box to pick a range appears, select the whole of
columns J and K just like you selected columns B and C before, and click
"OK". A dialogue box called Paste Special should then appear. The
defaults for this box should already be ideal for you, but just to
check, they should be like this
Add cells as: New Series
Values (Y) in: Columns
Series names in first row: YES
Categories (X values) in First column: YES
Replace existing categories: NO
When you click OK, your second bell curve should appear.
