Probably a basic question about graph markers

Does anyone know how to apply custom marker labels to a chart?

I have a chart, plotting newspaper circulation over the course of a few years. A few times during that time period our cover price changed and I need to label the chart with those changes.

My graph has markers already but they're irrelevant to the pricing changes and there are too many of them.

I want to reduce the number of markers along the graph to include only the time the pricing changed, and label the markers accordingly.


Is this something I can do?

I don't use this a lot, nor have I experimented with it to see how "custom" a shape it will allow. If you open the drawing toolbar, draw a shape in the spreadsheet, then copy the shape to the clipboard. Now select the series in the chart and paste. The series will now use the pasted shape.

I've only used this for basic shapes available in the drawing toolbar.

A couple of things to note. It seems that it would usually take me a few tries to get the marker sized correctly, as you lose the ability to control marker size using the Format->Data series dialog once you've pasted the custom marker on. The other thing is that you can't go back and reselect one of the built in data markers without deleting the data series and re-adding it.

Does that help?

That is something different. Sorry I misunderstood the first time.

When I do something like this, I find it easiest to simply add another data series with the desired data points. Assuming your original x-data are in A, and your original y-data are in B, add a third column (C) that contains only those data points that you want to highlight, with the other cells blank.

The first data series can be formatted as just a line without markers, and the second series can be formatted as markers without lines.

Does that help?

That's exactly what I need to do. However, I am still having trouble getting the markers to appear where they should.

I'm becoming convinced that what I want to do is not possible.

I modified my source data but maybe I didn't modify it correctly:

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My aim was to have the price change dates indicated in Column C.

But when I added a second series of data to my chart I got this:

http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/8...ot00116yb5.jpg

I'm really stumped. This started out as a 10 minute project and I've been trying to get this accomplished for the last 2 hours now. I really don't know what to do.

Am I just screwing up the source data? I'm sorry if I'm being dumb - I just don't get this - it seems like it should be so simple to just add new markers and name them what I want.

I agree, it shouldn't be that difficult. Part of the problem may be that I still don't entirely understand what you want to do.

What I was envisioning was:

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The series representing the 2nd column is formatted a line w/o markers and the 3rd column is formatted as markers w/o a line. This "highlights" those two data points.

I didn't previously understand that the points you wanted to highlight would be between the existing data points. How best to approach this will depend on whether you are using a line chart or a scatter plot. Personally, I would use a scatter plot. Start with your original data set plotted. Then, somewhere in the spreadsheet add

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Then paste this series into the scatter plot (use paste special so you can make sure Excel uses the 1st column as the x-values for this series). Or use the Chart->Source Data dialog to add the series. As before, the 1st series is formatted w/o markers and the 2nd series is formatted w/o lines.