Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 Inside Out

Switching Rows and Columns

It would be great if Excel always knew exactly what you wanted and gave you a perfect chart on the first try. Unfortunately, although the program is intelligent, it is not clairvoyant. One of the things it might get wrong on occasion has to do with the assignment of series and data points. For example, suppose you want to plot the following table as a simple two-dimensional column chart:

If you follow the steps described a few paragraphs ago, Excel gives you this:

That is, it plots each yearly column in the source range as ...