For hours I have been trying to do this, without success. When there are two columbs of numbers, in the bidy of a table (the sheet), there seems to be no way to make a line plot one column vs the other, as is easy to do in Excel. A scatter plot seems to work, but not a line plot.
Weird!
Can someone tell me if a line plot is possible?
Thanks so much.
iMac
Hi Edward,
The Numbers approach is to use several small Tables to hold data with common themes, rather than 'islands' of data in an 'ocean' of a Sheet. (Credit to Barry or Jerry or Wayne for this useful analogy).
Copy (or link) your graph data to a Table devoted to that purpose. Make the Column (or Row) holding X data into a Header.
Regards,
Ian.
Ian,
Thank you for your response....I will try it out. However, this is far more complicated than Excel and will force me to abandon Numbers for Excel, which I was hoping to avoid needing for my new MacBook Pro.
Edward
Hi Edward,
The Numbers appoach:
Or, use a Scatter Plot and add a connection Line or Trendline in Format Panel > Series:
Regards,
Ian.
Even better, The Very large table can be on another Sheet, leaving your "Presentation" Sheet neat and tidy for printing or showing on screen.
Regards,
Ian.
It is simple to do what you want. It is two extra steps as compared to doing it the "Numbers" way with the X data and the series names in headers. Note that a line plot is not a true X-Y plot of X vs Y unless your X data is evenly spaced and in numerical order.
1. Select the Y data and make a line chart
2. With the chart selected, go to the Axis tab of the Format sidebar, click on the "Category X" button, and replace the "Label References" with references to your X data. In my example I changed it to Table 1::D6:D8 and it expanded it out into separate cell references.
3. Click on the Series tab and change the "name" reference to point to your series name in the chart. In my example I changed it to Table 1::E5
Yellowbox, Badunit,
Thank you for your responses. This shows me that I am not missing an easy way to generate plots with Numbers.
Previously, I have used an Excel sheet to gather laboratory data and plot it next to the data list. The sheet will have several sets of data. In other cases the "data" are generated with equations. I was hoping that Numbers would alow me to not need Excel, but this is not the case.
Unfortunately, there is still a strong case to be made for using Excel. It is, in fact, a powerful and evolved piece of software, but I was hoping to not spend ANY money at Microsoft. But at least I do not have to deal with one of the new Windows operating systems.
Again, thank you for helping see the way forward.
Edward1064
I'm not sure what you're doing in Excel that makes it easier. I tried making a line chart four different ways in Excel using data in the middle of a worksheet and none of them were right. Not one line chart had the X axis data included on the chart as the X axis labels, just "1,2,3...". I was able to make a scatter chart that had the X and Y data points correctly placed but it takes a few more steps after that to get the axis labels on the chart. I didn't see a big difference in time usage between Excel and Numbers. Maybe I just don't know how to make charts easily in Excel.
Is it possible to make a simple y vs x line graph, when neither of the two data series is in a header?
