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Technote 26 – Energy Graph With Excel
To draw your own graphs with data collected on the BMO website, you must first download the data
from the BMO website. Use your web browser (Firefox, Explorer, etc) and log into the BMO site.
1. Select the AcquiSuite and device from the tree display to the left. Select the "export data" tab
from the frame on the right. You will be presented with the data export page.
2. Select a date range for the data you want to process. Selecting only the data which you need
will make the data file smaller and easier to work with.
3. By default, Excel uses tab delimited data, however you may specify comma delimited data.
(data are enclosed with double quotes, with a column between columns).
4. Select "column headers" as required. (default setting includes the column header in the
exported data)
5. Select "timezone" as required. This will adjust the log data to match your timezone. If the data
was recorded in EST, and you select PST as the export option, each timestamp will be adjusted
by 3 hours.
6. Click "Export Data" and save the data file to your hard disk.
Launch Excel. The following instructions are written for Excel 2000. (MS Office 2000) however most
steps will be the same in other various versions of Excel, and likely have equivalent operations in other
spreadsheet editors such as in OpenOffice.org. This is a basic example.
From the File/Open menu, 0pen
the text file into a new Excel sheet,
as you normally would.
You should see a table that is
similar to Illustration 1.
Based on the example, we will
create a chart based upon the
"time" and
"Energy_Consumption" columns.
Illustration 1: Data Table
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Using the mouse, while holding down the
CTRL key, select the time column and one
data column as shown in Illustration 2.
Note that it is not critical to select any
specific range if you want to graph all the
sheet data.
After making the data range selection(s),
click on "Insert" from the Excel menu bar,
then select "Chart...". This should launch
the MS ChartWizard.
On step 1 of 4 of the ChartWizard, and for
this example, select a Chart Type of "Line"
and then press the Next button.
On step 2 of 4 of the ChartWizard, you will
see a preview of the graph, as well as
selections for the Data Range and Series.
Don't worry about the fact that the
preview is not what we are looking for.
(See Illustration 3) We will fix that in the
ChartWizard's step 3. Don't make any
changes in step 2 of ChartWizard, just
click Next and move on.
Illustration 2: Select Columns
Illustration 3: Data Ranges
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On step 3 of 4 of the ChartWizard, select
the radio button of "Category" under
"Category (X) axis" as shown in Illustration
4. You might notice that before you make
the selection, the default is "Automatic".
We don't want Automatic, because we
want Category. After making the
selection, click the Next button.
On step 4 of 4 of the ChartWizard, just
click Finish, you should have a date and
time based X-axis as shown in Illustration
5.
Of course, more data ranges can be
included, and the chart can be resized and
formatted (fonts, label orientation, etc.) as
needed to get a more or less granular
date/time listed X-axis.
Illustration 4: X axis
Illustration 5: Finished Chart