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Lying by Obscuring the Data
This problem actually results from following rules. I always complain when people leave
cells blank instead of putting in zeros. I hammer this home in my Power Excel seminars,
and I mock Microsoft for all the blank cells in a pivot table. However, this accountant’s
desire to have zero in the future cells caused the chart line to plummet to zero.
The solution is to replace the future cells with empty cells, using Alt+E+A+A (or selecting
Edit, Clear All), or explicitly put
=NA() in the future cells. If you use either of these methods,
Excel changes the 2007 line to end with a nice 140,000 cash balance, as shown in Figure ...