change horizontal axis scale in excel for mac

Change Horizontal Axis Scale In Excel Series Of Monthly

Even though any sentient human knows that the labels Sales-03, Sales-04, and Sales-05 represent consecutive years, Excel is oblivious to what these labels actually mean.

Instead of entering text labels, you can enter actual dates or times.

Because Excel stores dates and times as numbers, it can scale the chart accordingly (this process is sometimes called category axis scaling).

Change Horizontal Axis Scale In Excel Series Of Monthly

The pictured worksheet shows two charts that illustrate the exact same data: a series of monthly sales figures from two regions (covering the time period between January 2007 and December 2008).

The diamonds and triangles on the line charts indicate the data points for which sales data is available.

The twist is that a big chunk of data (the months between August 2007 and June 2008) is missing.

To make sure Excel handles this omission correctly, you must enter real date values (rather than text labels) for the category axis.

If you take that step, the chart Excel creates automatically uses a continuous timescale, as shown in the top chart.

As you can see by looking at the data points, no values fall in the middle of the series.).

Thats how the incorrect chart in figure above was created.

Why youd want to do it is another question, but someone, somewhere, is probably in desperate need of this feature.) To change how Excel scales the category axis, select the chart, and then choose Chart Tools: Layout Axes Axes Primary Horizontal Axis More Primary Horizontal Axis Options to show the Format Axis dialog box.

You can scale any category axis values, as long as theyre numeric, which is particularly useful if youre trying to determine the relationship between two different values.

If you wanted to determine the relationship between students IQs and their test scores, you could use the numeric IQ for the category axis, and use the test scores for the value axis.

If you want to create a chart like this that compares two sets of numbers, you must use a scatter chart instead of a line chart by BrainBell updated Aug 01, 2016.

Change Horizontal Axis Scale In Excel For Mac