Cannot get dates right in TimeSeries

[EthanLevy]

Hello,

I'm seeing bizarre behavior when loading dates in to TimeSeries with Text Import.  My data are monthly measurements over twelve years, date only, no time, in an Excel sheet.  I have tried saving as .txt, .csv, with different cell formatting; I've tried various"Date" formats, "Text," "General," and even just entering number of days-since-1/1/1900.  The TsTime field shows the dates as they were in excel, (e.g. "7/24/2002" or "2002-07-24", etc.) but does not use them. Here is what is happening:

1. Time Series Grapher shows my groundwater hydrograph with the correct TsValue on the y-axis, but they are perfectly equally spaced and assigned a date starting at 12/30/1899 and each record is one day later, i.e. Wells with 17 records end on 1/15/1900, wells with 125 records end on 4/29/1900, etc.  My data are not perfectly equally spaced, so, even if I ignore the dates, this is bad.

2.  I used the empty "UTCOffset" field to try calculating a date field from TsTime.  If I just set UTCOffset = TsTime, they output as days-since-1900, e.g. 38928.   None of the date-related functions in Python or VBScript have succeeded, rather they fail or populate <null> values.

3. I've tried various reset-type fixes like creating new excel files, clearing my Temp folder, moving to a brand new map/geodatabase, but no luck.

I feel that I've exhausted the google and forum search for similar issues and my clicking finger is sore... I must be missing something.

Any insight?!

Thanks heaps

Ethan

[EthanLevy]

OK, I solved this issue, in large part.

After graphing with the Time Series Grapher, I opened Properties on the graph, changed X field from "Ascending" to "None," and changed X label field from "<None>" to "TsTime" (the same as the X field).

This still seems like strange behavior for a time series grapher--why else would I want to graph a time series than to see it in an order/spacing that matches the times/dates, with labels to match?

I further note that setting "X label field" to "TsTime" without changing "Ascending" to "None" does not accomplish this goal (it maintains equal spacing on the x-axis and does not use the values as labels, i.e. each value is labelled from 1899-12-30 with an interval of one day).  When values are dates/times, why does "ascending" not display these values in chronological order with appropriate intervals?

Now I am wondering if I can set the default graph options to this desired behavior (labelling x-axis with x-field values and not "ascending") so that I don't have to change the properties for every graph.

Thanks,

Ethan