controlling bubble size in bubble chart

Theodore Lee wrote:

How does one control the size of the bubbles that are drawn in a bubble chart?

As far as I can tell the way to vary the size of the bubbles is to drag the chart larger or smaller, perhaps also adjusting Max and Min for the axis scale.

If you haven't seen it already, recommend having a look at the Bubble Chart example in the Charting Basics template (File > New and select in the template chooser)

SG

Theodore Lee wrote:

As best I can tell, there is no way to tell Numbers what size you want for the largest bubble -- it seems to automatically set it to some default size, which can't be changed

In what way do you think Numbers is picking the "wrong" size for the bubbles? Could you post a screenshot?

In my testing Numbers maintains a good proportionality among the bubble sizes, which I think is a good thing. If for some reason I wanted to emphasize the largest bubble (i.e. make it disproportionately large relative to the others) I'd probable adjust the value in the table on which the chart is based.

SG

Hi Ted,

I'm trying to draw a chart showing the correlation between two variables with differing weights for the observations

I think we need more information before we can help you. Please tell us what the two variables are (perhaps X and Y?) and the weights or observations (perhaps the bubble size?)

Please post a screen shot (or copy part of your table and paste into a reply).

More information will lead to a solution 🙂.

Regards,

Ian.

You may get a little closer to what you want with this:

As far as I can tell there isn't a way to adjust the size of the largest bubble, though, except by dragging the whole chart smaller or larger.

SG

From what I can tell, if you add one more value to your table that has no X or Y, just a "bubble size", and you make that size bigger than all the sizes of the real data, the bubbles shown on the chart will be smaller than before.

Badunit wrote:

From what I can tell, if you add one more value to your table that has no X or Y, just a "bubble size", and you make that size bigger than all the sizes of the real data, the bubbles shown on the chart will be smaller than before.

That works here. Thanks!

(I tried to make the bubbles bigger than the default too, by putting in a smaller size than all the sizes of the real data, but that doesn't seem to work.)

SG

Glad it worked! Learned something new here. However, it was Badunit who posted the the solution, so maybe you can give him credit.🙂

SG

No problem. We've probably all shared each other's points at some time or another.