How do ignore cells in chart, or select only specific cells for chart?

[Evan Amies-Galonski]

OK so I'm making graphs for yearly discharge of river systems and this requires my to enter a value for every day of the year. I also need to have means, maximums and minimums for each month. This means i need to have only 1 value for each month of the year. I'm having trouble putting both of these things into the chart because there are blank spaces between all of the cells for the monthly means, maximums and minimums since all of the cells adjacent to them are filled. Excel takes each of the blank cells as a value of 0, and its making my graph wrong, so my question is, how do i get excel to ignore the blank cells?

[Ken Puls]

Hi there,

Honestly, I don't think your issue is around zero values. Assuming you're working on January you could:

• Calculate the max of all January and return it for each day in January
• Calculate it for just one day and let Excel draw the line between the two points on it's own.

Personally, I'd do the former.

Your data has many more issues though. With the values for January/February having a B after them, they are not charting, as they are not values and Excel can't interpret them. Your date column also doesn't hold true dates.

I would start by filling the first column with each day in the year, and cleaning up your data. (Column C doesn't have a title, so I'm not sure what is supposed to be there.)

Once you've got that done, then we can start on tweaking the chart to have the correct data and making it display correctly.