Forum Discussion
John_Corzan510
Jun 26, 2020Copper Contributor
Problem with Chart Axis in Excel
My chart axis shows only every other date, rather than every consecutive date that I want.
John_Corzan510
Jun 26, 2020Copper Contributor
That was the first thing I checked. Major Units is set at 1 day.
SergeiBaklan
Jun 26, 2020MVP
And axis is not text? can you apply custom format to dates in axis formatting?
- John_Corzan510Jun 27, 2020Copper Contributor
Axis is date, but I've tried changing it just to see what would happen, but it didn't seem to make a difference. I don't know what custom format I'd choose that would affect which dates are displayed.
Frustrating thing is I got it to correct in one chart by correcting the 'Bounds' dates. Problem is, that didn't correct in any other chart. Even tried saving the corrected chart as a template but it didn't correct the other charts.
- Riny_van_EekelenJun 27, 2020Platinum Contributor
John_Corzan510 Not sure if I can help solving the problem, but I experimented a little bit on both Mac and W10. It seems that the automatic axis formatting works very well if you don't have too many data points. Over-riding these automatic setting works fine as well. Created a chart filling half of my laptop screen with over 150 data points. Excel automatically displays every other date on the horizontal axis, with major units set at 2 (auto). Over-riding it to 1 didn't make any difference. Expanding the width of the chart so that the number of data points per centimeter became just over 2, displayed all date labels. So, a chart with 150 data points required a chart width of at least 75cm to display all labels on the horizontal axis. Likewise, a chart with 75 data points needed to be roughly 37cm wide. Not a very scientific approach but it seems that Excel will not display more than two labels per cm. I suppose that makes sense, as it would become illegible otherwise.
So, I wonder how many data points your charts contain in relation to the width of the charts?