solution

Ms. Compy Fix-It is Back! With an Excel 2007 Data Labels Workaround

clio441 Comment

Well hello there!  It’s certainly been a while.  I hope everyone’s been doing well and not having too many computer struggles.

I am happy to report that I have a workaround for that annoying (and completely inexplicable) Excel 2007 quirk of not allowing chart data label resizing.  I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve struggled with this, so I’m very excited to share my workaround with you, even if it’s not a complete fix.

(I’m working on making 3 charts fit in a very tiny space, so forgive the use and misuse of gridlines, titles, etc.. I’ve had to pare it down to barebones 🙂 )
Image

See how ugly they are?!  Ugh!  Well read on to see how to force it to use that extra space around it, like the pretty last graph.

In order to describe it properly, I’ll have to define what I mean when I say certain things:
“Whole Chart area” – the area that includes the chart, its axes, the title, and the legend (see below)
excel Example Pic 3.1
“Inner Chart area” – the area that gets selected that includes the data and not much else (see below)
Image

So, in my struggles with this, I’ve noticed a few things:

  • Excel changes the data labels when you resize the Whole Chart area
  • Excel doesn’t change the data labels when you resize the Inner Chart area
  • Excel will not reliably change your data label size when you increase or decrease your font size (sometimes it will even act differently from one chart to the next!  I’m still trying to figure that part out…..)

So!  If you want to adjust your data labels – say they’re crazy-thin like mine above:

  1. expand the Whole Chart area until your data label is as wide as you’d like
  2. shrink the Inner Chart area until your chart is the size you’d like
  3. select the Whole Chart area and ensure your background is “None” – as it’s now quite huge and will cover any other data you have beside it (if you wanted a nice border around your chart, you can always just draw a rectangle shape with no background and it’ll work almost as well)
  4. move around your axis label and title, as they’ll no longer be centred
  5. if you’d like the font size to be bigger/smaller, give it a try.  I found the data labels I adjusted in this way were able to increase/decrease font size after as well.  Who knows, maybe this frees them from their Excel-prison shackles!

excel Example Pic 5

Has this helped solve your problem?  Let me know in the comments!  🙂

Advertisement

Solution for “SPSS Error Code 2063 Getting Data”

clio4437 Comments

Hello all.

Just troubleshot (haha) my way out of an SPSS issue, and since the Interwebs couldn’t help me out, I’ll post it here for anyone else who might need it.

I was trying to import an Excel file that was basically a copy and paste from a different file.  So the file itself was pretty new, not like it’d been worked over a lot.  I tried to import it, however, and got the following error message:

“GET DATA /TYPE=XLSX  /FILE=*****
/SHEET=name ‘RawData’
/CELLRANGE=full
/READNAMES=on
/ASSUMEDSTRWIDTH=32767.
>Error.  Command name: GET DATA
>(2063) Error reading information for sheet.
>* Sheet Name: “RawData”
>This command not executed.
DATASET NAME DataSet1 WINDOW=FRONT.”

The error, as I could figure out, was probably due to me having calculations lower down in my sheet.  I copied and pasted values into a brand new sheet, and that imported just fine.  If you’re having the same issue, try copy and pasting Values only into a new sheet and see if that helps.

The More You Know…..  😉