[excel] How do I make a burn down chart in Excel?

Thank you for your answers! They definitely led me on the right track. But none of them completely got me everything I wanted, so here's what I actually ended up doing.

The key piece of information I was missing was that I needed to put the data together in one big block, but I could still leave empty cells in it. Something like this:

  Date         Actual remaining     Desired remaining
7/13/2009            7350                 7350
7/15/2009            7100
7/21/2009            7150
7/23/2009            6600
7/27/2009            6550
8/8/2009             6525
8/16/2009            6200
11/3/2009                                  0

Now I have something Excel is a little better at charting. So long as I set the chart options to "Show empty cells as: Connect data points with line," it ends up looking pretty nice. Using the above test data:

Book burn down chart

Then I just needed my update macro to insert new rows above the last one to fill in new data whenever I want. My macro looks something like this:

' Find the last cell on the left going down.  This will be the last cell 
' in the "Date" column
Dim left As Range
Set left = Range("A1").End(xlDown)

' Move two columns to the right and select so we have the 3 final cells, 
' including "Date", "Actual remaining", and "Desired remaining"
Dim bottom As Range
Set bottom = Range(left.Cells(1), left.Offset(0, 2))

' Insert a new blank row, and then move up to account for it
bottom.Insert (xlShiftDown)
Set bottom = bottom.Offset(-1)

' We are now sitting on some blank cells very close to the end of the data,
' and are ready to paste in new values for the date and new pages remaining

' (I do this by grabbing some other cells and doing a PasteSpecial into bottom)

Improvement suggestions on that macro are welcome. I just fiddled with it until it worked.

Now I have a pretty chart and I can nerd out all I want with my nerdy books for nerds.

Examples related to excel

Python: Pandas pd.read_excel giving ImportError: Install xlrd >= 0.9.0 for Excel support Converting unix time into date-time via excel How to increment a letter N times per iteration and store in an array? 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.16.0' provider is not registered on the local machine. (System.Data) How to import an Excel file into SQL Server? Copy filtered data to another sheet using VBA Better way to find last used row Could pandas use column as index? Check if a value is in an array or not with Excel VBA How to sort dates from Oldest to Newest in Excel?

Examples related to charts

how to set start value as "0" in chartjs? Removing legend on charts with chart.js v2 How to display pie chart data values of each slice in chart.js How to set ChartJS Y axis title? In Chart.js set chart title, name of x axis and y axis? Android charting libraries Click events on Pie Charts in Chart.js Swap x and y axis without manually swapping values How to clear a chart from a canvas so that hover events cannot be triggered? Remove x-axis label/text in chart.js

Examples related to excel-2007

Declare a variable as Decimal filter out multiple criteria using excel vba Excel Formula which places date/time in cell when data is entered in another cell in the same row Creating a list/array in excel using VBA to get a list of unique names in a column Delete all data rows from an Excel table (apart from the first) Excel formula to get week number in month (having Monday) Run-time error '1004' - Method 'Range' of object'_Global' failed A formula to copy the values from a formula to another column Excel how to find values in 1 column exist in the range of values in another Delete entire row if cell contains the string X