Friday, September 27, 2024

Google Sheets charts "add a series to start visualising your data" error and solution

Generally, we just select a range in Google Sheets and choose Insert -> Chart to get a chart automatically created from that range. But while debugging this issue, I had imported data from a text file which I had saved as csv after find/replace of spaces with commas, but google would not create a chart, instead showing "add a series to start visualising your data" and when I would add a range, it would say improper format.

It turned out that Google sheets had treated the numbers as text. So, the solution was to select the relevant ranges, Format -> Number -> Scientific (and then change back to Number or Automatic if required) . Once that was done, the automatic creation of charts worked.

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