Excel pivot chart linear time-scale
Question
I have a data set (~10000 rows) with the following form:
+---------------------------+---------------+-------------+
| DateTimeCreated | Machine | ProductName |
+---------------------------+---------------+-------------+
| 2009-03-03 00:00:12.217 | COMP001 | Product001 |
+---------------------------+---------------+-------------+
I have graphed this using a pivot table and chart with the following layout
Page: ProductName
Column: Machine
Row: DateTimeCreated - Group by Day, Hour, Minute
Data: Count of DateTimeCreated
This all works correctly however the timescale of the resulting graph is not linear. For those minutes of the day where the event I am tracking did not occur these minutes do not show on the graph. The event I'm tracking also can go hours without occurring which results in an even more non-linear graph.
Here is an attempt to illustrate the x-axis of my graph:
|09| 10 | 11 | 12 |14| 16 | 18 | 20 |23|
The desired result is:
|00|01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|etc
So each hour is the same size and is shown even if the event did not occurr (so on my Line graph the line simply goes to 0 for a while)
Can this be achieved?
Solution
I changed my data set to look like this
+---------------------------+---------------+-------------+-------+
| DateTimeCreated | Machine | ProductName | Count |
+---------------------------+---------------+-------------+-------+
| 2009-03-03 00:02:00.000 | COMP001 | Product001 | 2 |
+---------------------------+---------------+-------------+-------+
so that the query is grouping the events by minute and providing the count in the minute
I then generated a second data set that contained an entry for every minute of the day but with a count of 0 As I was only working with 24hr data sets this was not unreasonable
Combining the two data sets gives a linear timeline on the pivot chart.