But the Gray Background and Pastel Datapoints are Iconic

On his blog, Chad Orzel grumbles about the graphs of data he receives from his students made in Excel -- the plots he receives makes it look like they collected the data improperly but "no, they did the data collection right, but were tripped up by Excel." He says that the line plots, as Excel makes them, are unsuited for scientific data, instead he says you want to use a scatter plot. Those plots present the data properly even though they are "awful in almost every other respect." He says that the latest version of Excel has made some improvements, but he's at a loss to explain why the default graph lacks axis labels.