Stupid Numbers '08 Limitation

I have this Excel sheet that I use to track the weight of our cats ever since a few years ago the vet said we needed to get them both to slim down. Yes, it's geeky, but I am a geek. We had a need to track numeric data, I had a tool on my system for tracking numeric data. I suppose I could have done a poor job of tracking the data with slips of paper or something, but using Excel was the natural thing to do. A while back I dumped the whole thing in Numbers, because hey - I have a fancy-schmancy new spreadsheet, and the truth is that I hates me some Excel with a passion. Also - Office 2004 and Photoshop Essentials are the only PowerPC binaries I have left, so running Numbers is better! It worked OK, but I did something weird so the chart and the data weren't connected up properly. This morning I was entering a couple of months of data and took the time to redo everything. Which is great, and there are a lot of nice things about Numbers . . . but the chart is just wonky.

Back when we started weighing them (in late 2005) Heisenberg actually managed to crack 20 pounds at 20.20. Schrödinger got down to 10.60 one day back in 2006. Numbers insists that all data points be in the chart, so my maximum line can be no lower than 20.20 and my minimum can be no higher than 10.60. Fair enough, but just to make things look nice and round I set the minimum to 10 and the maximum to 21. Very nice. But! I can only have 10 steps in my chart, so each step has to 1.1 pound. If I could have 11 steps then each gridline would be a pound, but I guess that just leads to madness. Or something. So that level red line is 16 pounds even, but the gridlines around it are 15.5 and 16.6 pounds.

(And yes, I should probably update the "target lines". We decided quite a while ago that we were comfortably with anything around 11-12 pounds for Schrödinger and 16-17 pounds for Heisenberg. We actually started giving them a bit more food at that point and they got a lot less frantic about feeding time. They jag around a lot on the scale, but I think that's mostly that the scale is for human weights and isn't really accurate to tenths of a pound.)

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