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Can a column chart show positive values above the x-axis and negative values below the x-axis?

I use charts a lot in class to show results of studies, and I like to animate them so that I can reveal step by step. Keynote works great for this, but I haven't found a way to plot positives and negatives with the x-axis crossing at zero. Is this possible? It seems so simple, but I can't find a way, other than hacking something in powerpoint and pasting it in, which is less than elegant.

2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, Mac OS X (10.5.7), DVD Studio Pro 4

Posted on Oct 7, 2015 8:10 AM

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6 replies

Oct 13, 2015 7:33 AM in response to Gary Scotland

But is there a way to make the x-axis cross at zero and (or) not have the line at the bottom of the graph? That's what I'm trying to achieve.


(I can put a line at the zero mark, of course, but I can't remove the bottom line without obscuring it, and sometimes I have a gradient or image in the background, so obscuring it is not really an option.)


Thanks!

Oct 16, 2015 9:44 AM in response to Gary Scotland

Thanks. Sorry, I was forgetting the graph that was causing me the most trouble, and fixating on what I thought would fix it, which is to draw the x-axis elsewhere. You're right that these things would fix the simple case I described.


Here's the real problem: I sometimes want to compare to a baseline that is not zero. So, it's not just a matter of plotting negative values and removing the line. But of having the axis cross somewhere else.

Here's the graph that I ended up drawing in PowerPoint, where I just set the x-axis to cross at the relevant value of 98.6, and it automatically plotted higher values above the line and lower values below.

Any way to do this in Keynote, without having to rescale everything and paste text boxes for all the data points?


Thanks, and sorry again that my first question was not specific enough to the problem I'm having.

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Can a column chart show positive values above the x-axis and negative values below the x-axis?

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