chart for product sales

[metalgearslug]

Well they're not so much problems I just don't know how to go about doing the chart I have in mind.

Basically I have an excel worksheet with details of orders over a period of just over a year. Each row in the sheet corresponds to an individual order of which there are many a day. Each column corresponds to a detail of that order such as where it is going, product and such. I am wanting to show how the demand has increased since the time we started, in general not on any given product, but don't want to have to go through and manually count how many orders were on each day over such a large period of time (we're looking at 30,000+ orders). I originally thought I'd make a histogram but don't know if it fits my needs, and really can't figure out how to do it! Ideally I'd like a line graph, I've tried everything and so far nothing has worked!

I am crying out for help, hopefully someone understands what I want and how to do it? I'm a complete novice so it might be ridiculously easy! Hopefully not for my prides sake..

[teylyn]

metalgearslug,

this sounds like a case for a pivot chart. Have a look here to get you started

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Pivots/pivotstart.htm

I've also changed the title to something more meaningful.

[metalgearslug]

I don't know if that would apply from what I have played with in excel, unless I'm doing something wrong (quite possible if I'm honest). it just seems a bit complex for my needs. I literally just want to show how many orders were on a particular day over the past year, I'm not interested in say what the order was for or where it was going. literally at the end I just want to have a graph with the days along the bottom and the number of orders received on that day up the side, if that makes sense. I just can't figure out how to do it without counting them all for each given day and putting them in a seperate table.

PS it's a shame I can't use the pivot table thing because it looks pretty good from the instructional video's I've seen!

[teylyn]

Why don't you post a data sample with the same structure as your file. Make sure to replace confidential data with dummy text and include about a hundred rows or so. Then we all can have a look and find some suggestions.

cheers

[metalgearslug]

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Hi, this is a small portion of the table that I have. It's not quite product sales as it's more of a hospital equipment library but it is practically the same thing just we obviously don't charge people! But the only real thing I am interested in is the frequency at which the equipment is being booked out on each day. It might be usefull I guess to show what percentage of that days orders are say syringe drivers or volumetric pumps or whatever... Does that help any?

[teylyn]

post a workbook and include data for several days.

[metalgearslug]

Here's a little bit of it, hope it helps!

[metalgearslug]

I've had a break through with the pivot table tool! didn't realise I could have the same field in both the rows and data and I think it's done what I want to a degree however it's not registering as a date in Excel 2003 it's ordering it stupidly by putting all the first of the months together then the seconds and the thirds and so on!

Also it seems that I have far too much data to show on the table in a neat fashion, it looks very messy!

[teylyn]

I opened your sample file with Excel 2003 and the dates were fine, so I can't really see what the problem is. Are they stored as text or is the order of day/month vs month/day the wrong way round for your system?