I don't know who you were giving this advice to, but it is bad advice.
In a Line chart, specifying that the category axis is of type category
means that all data points are equally spaced along the x dimension.
So, 1/1/03 00:00, 1/1/03 01:00 and 1/1/03 05:00 will be the same
distance apart.
The *only* way I know of having XL treat time as a non-category entity
is to use a XY Scatter graph. Alternatively, to simulate the correct
seperation in a Line (or Column or Bar) chart, space the data with lots
of empty dummy entries.
Posted directly from Usenet newsgroup. For more see the 'Outlook
Express and Newsgroup' tutorial on my web site.

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Regards,
Tushar Mehta, MS MVP -- Excel
www.tushar-mehta.com
Excel, PowerPoint, and VBA add-ins, tutorials
Custom MS Office productivity solutions
> I went for about 2 years with this problem and even Microsoft would not
> help. They changed something between 97 and 200x and said that they
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