Struggling with charts

Question

I read the “charts are driving me nuts” thread and I feel the guy’s pain, for sure.
I’ll start with my questions and then expand on the problems I'm encountering>
How do I extend alternating row colors into a header column?
Why does Numbers not ‘see’ that my Y axis values are a percentage, and instead show them as 0.8 instead of 80%? And how can I tell it to represent the data as it is in the table?
Why does Numbers insist on trying to put every date into the X axis labels creating one solid blur of black instead of automatically spacing and showing every 3rd or 4th one so they are actually readable? And how I can I instruct it to do this?
I’ve got a table where we track the number of potential new client inquiry calls into our business compared to the number who actually book new client appointments. So we have a header row with the data labels, a header column with dates (for example, the header row for that column says “Week of” and then the column values will have a date, like “02/11/08”). The next two columns have input values, calls received, and clients booked. After that, everything is a calculation. We calculate the percentage for the week, then we calculate a 4 week moving average of new clients booked per week, percentage of calls turned into new clients, and then the last column is just an input number that is constant, the goal for what percentage of calls are booked into new clients (in this case, 90%).
So I'm trying to create two simple charts. One that shows the 4 week moving average of new clients booked, and one that compares the 4 week moving average of the percentage of calls booked versus the goal. The data itself comes out fine. It’s the axis that are hosed. The Y axis shows the data as decimal values instead of percentage on the second chart. And on both charts, the x axis is unreadable. Where Excel would show me like one date value every 4-6 weeks (I have a year worth of data), Numbers is trying to display every single date and thus it’s just one solid black blur.
I read the other thread talking about how data columns have to be adjacent (which is absolutely ridiculous), so I created a new table that just had the data I want to chart and pulled the data from the table into which I do my inputting, but no difference, I get the same output.
In Excel, this would be easy. In Numbers, not so much.
I’m really trying to find ways to make Numbers work, I loathe opening anything from Microsoft on my computer, but it is looking more and more like Numbers is not ready for prime time.

Answer 1

Conejo,
The difference between a Category Chart and an X-Y chart, in my experience:
In a Category chart the Independent Variable is a block of text, and the Dependent Variable is a numeric value.
In an X-Y chart, both Independent and Dependent Variables are numeric and the scales are continuous. It's been frequently discussed here that Numbers X-Y charts don't support lines, only isolated symbols. So, when you clicked on the line chart symbol, you selected one of the forms of Numbers Category charts.
Numbers has 16 formats of Category chart (8 planar and 8 pseudo 3-d) and only one form of X-Y Chart. Further, the Numbers X-Y charts don't edit in the way Excel charts do, and I haven't mastered them myself. I do ok with a single dependent variable, but when I attempt to add a second, I run into trouble. I'm hoping to get better at that with more practice.
On the subject of skipping categories though, I have to report to you that I succeeded, without trying, in having some of the labels skipped on the X-Axis. I was thinking of making some graphic examples for you and was shrinking a chart to fit it onto a screen shot when every other label disappeared! I changed the orientation of the labels from horiz. to diag. and the skipped labels came back. So, there's hope for your approach.
I'm well aware of how easily charts are produced in Excel and how easy they are to edit. I've worked with them from their inception. I'm not here to defend one program or the other, just to help folks who are interested in learning to work with Numbers. The selfish interest is that in trying to help, I end up learning too.
You can convert your categories to numeric data by charting against the number (value) of weeks or days from the base value, rather than against the "names" of the week dates, if you decide to try an X-Y chart.
Jerry