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Most people start by eye-balling the data. Instead, the idea is to get a line that has equal numbers of points on either side.
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In many cases, the line may not pass through very many of the plotted points. How do I construct a best-fit line?Ī best-fit line is meant to mimic the trend of the data.
WHY IS SCATTER CHART IN EXCEL SLOPING DOWN HOW TO
Work through it and the sample problems if you are unsure of how to complete questions about trends and best-fit lines. This page is designed to help you complete any of these types of questions. You may also be asked to approximate the trend, or sketch in a line that mimics the data. If you find yourself faced with a question that asks you to draw a trend line, linear regression or best-fit line, you are most certainly being asked to draw a line through data points on a scatter plot. All of these applications use best-fit lines on scatter plots (x-y graphs with just data points, no lines). For predictive purposes, we might prefer to know how often an earthquake is likely to occur on a particular fault or the possibility of a very large flood on a given river. We want to know if there is a relationship between the amount of nitrogen in the water and the intensity of an algal bloom, or we wish to know the relationship of one chemical component of a rock to another. Once the data in the cells is dates with times, you can apply what I have written above.In introductory geoscience, most exercises that ask you to construct a best-fit line have to do with wanting to be able recognize relationships among variables on Earth or to predict the behavior of a system (in this case the Earth system). You may want to convert your text to real date/times with the Text to Columns tool or another technique of your choice. Formatted as times, all integers will show up as midnight. Excel cannot recognize the text in column A as dates, so it just numbers the data points from first to last and plots these numbers on the X axis. Format the X axis labels to "General" and you may find that the labels are integer numbers. If you change your mind, edit your question and post a comment to let me know what you want.Įdit: Looks like your "dates" may actually be text. Not pretty, but that's what you asked for. That will cause all the date/time stamps to overlap and become unreadable, so you may want to revise that decision or make your chart very, very wide if you have more than a few hours of data or turn the X axis labels sideways which will look like this: make the major interval on the horizontal axis 1/12 of a day.Ī day is 1 in Excel, so the major interval needs to be 1 divided by 12, which is 0.08333333.
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If you want the time and date printed every two hours, you will need to Rows go left to right, columns go top to bottom) (By the way: The row with the time is not a row, but a column. It looks like the format for the axis labels is using only the time without the date. You can clearly see on the X axis that the markers are for 0:00 AM and these are consecutive days.įormat the X axis and you can see the settings for the Axis Options > Units will be 1 (for 1 day). As a last resort, you could reshape the timestamps in your logfile to some format that Excel can handle.Įxcel does not plot the time randomly. I'm guessing that your logfile is written by a device with a 'locale' that differs from the Internationalization settings on your machine, which makes it harder for Excel to properly recognize the timestamps. That option allows you to further specify the DMY order. "General" is the default, which does a fine job of recognizing dates, but you may need to nudge the process in the right direction by explicitly choosing "Date" type. Note how the Text Import Wizard offers the feature to customize each of the imported columns for data type. So your actual problem is getting the proper timestamps imported from some logfile.
WHY IS SCATTER CHART IN EXCEL SLOPING DOWN SERIES
Based on no input, Excel has made up a series of consecutive dates starting with the awesome Zeroeth of January, 1900 ! I got exactly the same 7 labels "12:00:00 AM" like you had, but the ultimate indication of what is going on, is to put the axis labels in date format. I had to seriously tweak a CSV import to get this wrong on purpose - Excel seems to be getting frighteningly smart at recognizing import data. As noted by the error stands out because the text data are left-justified. I reproduced your problem by intentionally entering text instead of time data in the first column. When entering proper timestamps in Excel, the scatterplot comes out right immediately (even though the axis labels need some tailoring to taste).