Excel's Formula - sisman

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Part V: Miscellaneous Formula Techniques
After performing all these steps, you may want to create a template to simplify the creation
of additional box plots. Activate the chart, and choose Chart Tools➜Design➜
Type➜Save As Template.
The legend for this chart displays the series in the order in which they are plotted — which is not
the optimal order and may be confusing. Unfortunately, you can’t change the plot order because
the order is important. (The up/down bars use the first and last series.) If you find that the legend
is confusing, you may want to delete all the legend entries except for Mean and 50th Percentile.
Plotting every nth data point
Normally, Excel doesn’t plot data that resides in a hidden row or column. You can sometimes use
this to your advantage because it’s an easy way to control what data appears in the chart.
Suppose you have a lot of data in a column, and you want to plot only every 10th data point. One
way to accomplish this is to use filtering in conjunction with a formula. Figure 17-10 shows a twocolumn
table with filtering in effect. The chart plots only the data in the visible (filtered) rows and
ignores the values in the hidden rows.
The example in this section, named plot every nth data point.xlsx, is available
on the companion CD-ROM.
Figure 17-10: This chart plots every nth data point (specified in A1) by ignoring data in the rows hidden by
filtering.