New charter frustrated by Excel

I'm trying to set up what I thought was a fairly basic kind of plotted graph, with years (in increments of 5 is fine) along the x axis and 0-100, in increments of 10 on the Y.

Firstly, I'm a literary historian and am working in the years 1790 to 1840, but it seems that Excel doesn't acknowledge anything before 1900. Is this right? (I haven't been able to find a workaround).

OK, so once I'd accepted this limitation, I decided to use 1990-2040 as my date range (and mentally subtract 200 years!). But because the chart wizard doesn't allow you to set the minimum and maximum for the date range (it defaults to 2000), when I change that later (from the Properties box), I lose all the plotted data. Any ideas about why?

Perplexed and frustrated in Belfast

Can you supply a copy of the data?