Why won't Prism transform my X values?

Problem: You see your original data in the results table rather than transformed values:

This can happen if your data table is not an XY table, so has no X column. In older veresions of Prism (up to Prism 4), this happened when the X column in the data table was formatted for entry of text, rather than numbers. If this is the case, you'll see that the X column is labeled "X labels" rather than "X values". And you'll see that the numbers you enter are left justified rather than right justified.

To fix the problem, from the data table click Change. With Prism 5 or later, choose Format Data Table, the choose an XY table. With prism 4, choose Column Format and then select that you want to format the X column as numbers.

If the results are all blank.

When you ask it to do an impossible operation, Prism leaves the answers blank. For example if you choose a X=log(X) transform, the results are undefined if your X values are negative or zero. Similarly, the results will be blank if you try to take the square root of negative numbers or do any other impossible mathematical transformation.