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 (Netscape, 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.

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 figure 1.   Based on the example, we will create a chart based upon the "time" and "Energy_Consumption" columns.

Using the mouse, while holding the the CTRL key, select the time column and one data column as shown in figure 2.  Note, one can not worry about selecting any specific range if they 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 figure 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.

On step 3 of 4 of the ChartWizard, select the radio button of "Category" under "Category (X) axis" as shown in figure 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 figure 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.

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$Date: 2004/08/17 22:31:07 $ $Revision: 1.10 $ Contact Us