Graphing Bandwidth Over Time In Excel

You would think that something as simple as graphing a rate over time would be easy in Excel—and it is—but you it's not really intuitive, at least to me.

Let's say you have 48-hours worth of data (I'm making this up, btw).

If you try to select these two columns and then click on Line Graph, here's what you get.

That's obviously not what we want. The trick is to use a Scatter Plot. I prefer Straight Marked Scatter.

And here's the final result.

I did have to make two changes.

1. Vertically align the x-axis text
2. Change the x-axis scale