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How Do I Make a Spreadsheet Graph Containing Time Values?

I find this a little difficult to explain, but I’ll try:

I have a simple spreadsheet with 2 columns. The first contains Dates in format dd.mm.year, and the second contains Time in format hh:mm. Each line refers to an ‘occurence’, not a value in the spreadsheet.

What I would like to have is a graph showing how each day’s occurences are distributed through the day. I have made a Column graph, but the Time values don’t show correctly; (I can send you a screen shot).

Catalina 10.15.2 and Numbers 6.2.1
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Jan E. Wille

Comments: 4 Responses to “How Do I Make a Spreadsheet Graph Containing Time Values?”

    4 years ago

    Are the columns actual date and time values, or are they strings of text? Make sure that are actual date and time values first. Click on one and look at the bottom left corner. If it says "Text" then they are text and can't be plotted. It should read "Actual" there.

    Then just select those two columns, and click the Chart button, select 2D Scatter. It should plot those points with time as one axis and date as another. Is that what you are trying to do?

    If not, then what do you want on each axis?

    Note: You cannot plot a 2D Scatter chart this way if either of the columns are a "header" column. Make sure they are regular columns. Otherwise, the "header" column is seen as a label, not a value.

    Jan E. Wille
    4 years ago

    The values are Actual, and there are no Header columns or lines. - Maybe this is a matter of formats?. Even if I have formatted column A as ‘dd.mm.yyyy’ and column B as ‘hh.mm’, the actual cell content in both columns are ‘dd.mm.yyy hh.mm.ss’. I can understand if this cause a problem when the values are plotted in a chart.

    4 years ago

    Jan: Formats shouldn't matter, as the actual value is stored as a date/time (number of seconds since 1970). But try changing the format to see if that matters. Also, try a very simple example in a separate document with just a few dates and times to see if that works.

    Jan E. Wille
    4 years ago

    I opened a brand new spreadsheet and filled in (NOT copied) the data, and now my chart is just as I wished. What a way to start a new spreadsheet year!

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