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Step through data with cursor keys method has changed

J

John Mansfield

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Hi, my name is John and as a test engineer I use excel to to plot out instrumentation data on line graphs. I have done this for 15 years and am pretty competant with Excel but nowhere near ninja status.

I have a question which is very basic yet i cannot find an answer. The company i work for upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 and the way in which you select a single data point on a scatter or line chart has changed. You used to have two small black squares which tracked through the data following each other when you used the cursor keys. This was great as when you have thousands of data points it made it very easy to identify a peak value.
This has now been replaced by one larger square which when you hover over it with the mouse displays various values and is of far less use to me. It has lost the precision of the two dots method.
I wish there were some way of switching back to the older two small black squares method of data point selection. I am sure this change must have happened for a reason but i find no benefit in it.
Any advice greatly appreciated, Thanks John
 
John

Firstly, Welcome to the Chandoo.org Forums

It is so long ago that I used this in Excel 2003 that I can't comment

But In Excel 2010, you can use the up/down arrows to step through the series and other chart objects in order
Once you have found a series you can step through the individual points with the Right/Left arrow keys
 
Hi Hui, Thank you for getting back to me.
The problem I have is that my data is sampled at 1Khz so every sample is one millisecond. My data trace values can be quite critical as to if the meet a spec or not and timings are very important. The old 2003 system put two black dots on the data that followed the data precisely and showed you exactly the value. The 2010 system has a relatively large square with four corners which have dots on. Depending on where you hover the mouse you get different values. This can lead to errors and to avoid this i have to manually go back to the raw data values sheet and find the time i am after in column A and then the corresponding value in what could be anything up to around column CA. I may need to identify multiple peaks on various charts so writing macros is not always the answer either.
It probably took a lot of time for someone at Microsoft to introduce this new method of tracking the data but I can see no benefit in it and it is a change that really wasn't required. If my company would allow it, i would still use 2003. Unfortunately they cannot support it so i am scuppered! I cannot even find what this feature is called so cannot find any explanantion as to what if anything the newer method offers.
Thanks
John
 
Could you implement a zoom function to allow you zoom in and scan through the data graphically showing a small time zone ie: 50/100 Milli Seconds instead of several seconds ?
 
Hi Hui,
I could do that but i still don't understand why they introduced this when they updated Excel. With other office programmes the changes they made improved it. With Excel, some of the changes between 2003 to 2007 and then 2010 don't make any sense to me. They also took out the VBA function to allow you to lock charts to an exact pixel size. I used that for making avi video files of charts with a moving cursor. I had to rewrite my code to do that and now have to embed charts. The official answer from microsoft on that one was that they had bugs with it in 2007 so removed it altogether. The current chart sizes are governed by print settings so the zoom changes all the settings which means i have to tweek it a lot. I use that to allow me to sync high speed video and data charts together for analysis. As i said before, for me at least Excel 2003 didn't need changing. They coulod have introduced the ribbon menus and left it at that.

The square on the chart points is bonkers in my view.
Thanks
John
 
Hi John ,

As far as I can see , if your chart has a hundred thousand data points , you need a mechanism so that you can go to any data point which you wish so that you can see what the value of that data point is. Using the mouse enables you to get the tooltip giving all the information about the data point , whereas using the cursor keys does not. At the same time , using the mouse does not allow you to step from one data point to the other because of the density of the data , not because of millisecond timing.

If you don't mind using VBA , you can display data regarding a point as you step through the data using the cursor keys.

Narayan
 
Hi Narayan,
For the amount i need to do this i can make do, i just don't understand the advantage of the new selection tool. It may be brilliant but i really don't understand what it does better than before. Without really zooming in it introduces a degree of uncertainty that wasn't there before. Progress?

Thanks for the reply. Did you know you share your name with a dance track by the Prodigy? That's cool!

Cheers
John
 
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