MS Excel Graph Question?

I did a test with your date data and found that if you select the dates and then on the Home Tab click on Replace and enter a space as the thing to find and in the replace field enter a - and click on replace all, your dates are changed to an Excel recognized date.

Now having done that, you can select all your data and create the chart of your choice. You can also create a Pivot Table or Pivot Chart that will break down your data by months. Take a look at Pivot Table in the help file for Excel to get an idea of just how you could take advantage of this feature. From your description, this is what I would look at for analyzing the data.

From the way I'm interpreting your question, I would just make a separate chart that looks something like this:

Month: # Events:

1 5

2 3

3 8

etc.

then if you know how to make a chart, do it with that. (highlight that section and find the "make chart" button. use the options on there to customize it)

Hope this helps. That's how I interpreted your question.