Glad to hear from someone who's working through the examples. For your new sketch, a few questions:

In the end, how are you planning to show the data, and what are you trying to learn from it? Are you looking for trends over the course of several months/years, or are you looking to compare cyclic trends (e.g. overlay each year so you can compare January 2003 vs. January 2004 and 2005).

Also, does that data begin and end cleanly in January of one year and December of another?

I did figure out my problem, I created a new float and used math to generate an X distance to the next volumeInterval -    float p=(coltype-1)*7.3

I changed the "7.3" to visually line up with where 12 months seemed to fall in my layout and it seemed to work. I'm sure there is better math that could do it more accurately. If anyone else is interested in this same kind of problem, here's the code I used below. I also added a rollover with the month converted to the actual name.


//draw the data as a series of points
void drawDataPoints(int col){
 for (int row=0; row<rowCount;row++) {
   float coltype = data.getFloat(row,0);
   int coli = int(coltype);
   float p=(coltype-1)*7.3;
   if (data.isValid(row,col)) {
     float value = data.getFloat(row,col);
     float x = map(years[row], yearMin, yearMax, plotX1, plotX2);
     float y = map(value, dataMin, dataMax, plotY2, plotY1);
     point (x+p,y);
 
 String monthNames="";
 if (coli==1){
   monthNames = "January"; // happiness
 }
 
else if (coli==2){
   monthNames = "February";
 }
 
  else if (coli==3){
   monthNames = "March";
 }
 
  else if (coli==4){
   monthNames = "April";
 }
  else if (coli==5){
   monthNames = "May";
 }
  else if (coli==6){
   monthNames = "June";
 }
  else if (coli==7){
   monthNames = "July";
 }
  else if (coli==8){
   monthNames = "August";
 }
  else if (coli==9){
   monthNames = "September";
 }
  else if (coli==10){
   monthNames = "October";
 }
  else if (coli==11){
   monthNames = "November";
 }
  else if (coli==12){
   monthNames = "December";
 }
 
 
  float d = dist(x+p,y,mouseX,mouseY);  
 
       if((d<5) && (d < closestDist)) {
         closestDist = d;
         closestText = monthNames + "\n$" + value;
         closestTextX = x + p;
         closestTextY = y-40;
       }
   }
 }