# Microsoft Office Application Help - Excel Help forum > Excel Charting & Pivots >  >  Improved surface contour charts

## llawrence

I would like to create surface contour charts but the excel's built in charting has major limitations that I need to overcome. Specifically: he graph has no meaningful axis values. Just arbitrary numbers.

Are there any ways around theses limitation?

Thanks.

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## teylyn

Hi,

Jon Peltier has a good article on contour charts.

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/P...cle.asp?ID=447

He recognises the limitations of them, too:





> Some of our favorite formatting tricks are not available in surface charts. Surface charts do not support data labels, error bars, secondary axes, or combinations with series of other chart types. The X and Y axes are almost untouchable: you can choose whether to show tick labels, and how frequently, and you can format the text. Because these axes are category type axes, you can't change the scales. There is no time axis option.



But towards the end of the article he points to Andy Pope and Tushar Mehta, who have evaluated alternative approaches. 

http://andypope.info/charts.htm  - Andy Pope
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=MP....microsoft.com  - Tushar Mehta

hope that helps

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## llawrence

Thanks. I realized that there is a bigger problem with Excel 3D charts. The contour plots give you no control over the values where the contour boundaries occur. That is, suppose I have a contour plot of temperatures ranging from from 0 to 100 with 5 divisions. Excel with automatically put the contour lines every 20 degrees. Suppose I want a contour line for 32 degrees. I don't see how that can be done. Is it possible?

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## Andy Pope

The contour bands is controlled via the scale major value.
If you right click the legend, on  a surface chart, you can adjust the scale.

Check out the contours examples on Fernando's page.
http://www.prodomosua.eu/ppage02.html

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## llawrence

> The contour bands is controlled via the scale major value.
> If you right click the legend, on  a surface chart, you can adjust the scale.
> 
> Check out the contours examples on Fernando's page.
> http://www.prodomosua.eu/ppage02.html



No, that doesn't fix the problem. There is no way that I can have bands, say at 0, 32 and 100. There is no way to have bands on a log scale, i. e., 1, 10, 100. There is no way to set the colors of the bands, etc.

I tried countours.xla from http://www.prodomosua.eu/ppage02.html, but it doesn't work. I keep getting an error, "Compile Error in Hidden Module: ModGrid". Sometimes I tried to install it and it won't accept the password. The whole thing is a complete mess.

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## shg

If your function is mathematical, you may be able to solve for the contour lines in closed form and plot them on a separate scatterplot; there's a simple example at http://www.excelforum.com/excel-char...e-display.html.

Then there's Mathematica, which can do anything ...

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## RobC56

> No, that doesn't fix the problem. There is no way that I can have bands, say at 0, 32 and 100. There is no way to have bands on a log scale, i. e., 1, 10, 100. There is no way to set the colors of the bands, etc.
> 
> I tried countours.xla from http://www.prodomosua.eu/ppage02.html, but it doesn't work. I keep getting an error, "Compile Error in Hidden Module: ModGrid". Sometimes I tried to install it and it won't accept the password. The whole thing is a complete mess.



I think it needs to be clearly stated that you need to change the chart type from "contour" to "3D surface" to be able to reformat the axis. Select the axis and go to format axis. Here you can change the axis as you would like to as per normal excel i.e. you can do a log scale 0.1 1 10 or any base you wish i.e. 2 gives 2 4 8 16 etc. However I think you cannot do uneven bands, 0 32 100 at the moment I have not found this feature in excel

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## RobC56

> No, that doesn't fix the problem. There is no way that I can have bands, say at 0, 32 and 100. There is no way to have bands on a log scale, i. e., 1, 10, 100. There is no way to set the colors of the bands, etc.
> 
> I tried countours.xla from http://www.prodomosua.eu/ppage02.html, but it doesn't work. I keep getting an error, "Compile Error in Hidden Module: ModGrid". Sometimes I tried to install it and it won't accept the password. The whole thing is a complete mess.



I meant to add, that you can change back from a "3D surface" to a "contour" chart and excel will keep the changes to the scale in the legend. I note that on a 3D surface chart I cannot change the scales just by right clicking the legend, there is nothing there that allows you to change the scale.

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## iXL

To create real Contour Plots in Excel, try Contour Plot or EZplot at www.OfficeExpander.com
There are demo versions to try.
Cheers

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