Wednesday, October 12, 2016

I finally figured out how to show Quarterly and Monthly Data on the Same Excel Chart


Quarterly Data from FRED. Monthly Data from Macroeconomic Advisers

Make it a scatter plot, not a line chart.

1 comment:

The Arthurian said...

Excel understands units of time -- days, weeks, months, years. But there doesn't seem to be an easy way to tell it "this data is monthly and that data is quarterly" even though the dates are right there next to the data in the spreadsheet. At least I couldn't make it work.

It suddenly occurred to me that if you think of the dates as just numbers, Excel would know how to graph them. If the dates are just values, excel can match up January with the First Quarter, and April with the Second Quarter, and it will know that February and March go in between the First and Second Quarters. I think that's what's going on.

Anyway, I did it, and it worked.