While most users might not take full advantage of the features that the program has to offer, there are some exciting tools, like charts and graphs, that you can quickly create. These changes shift the line to fit date range shown in the horizontal axis.įinally, I'll to bump up the text size of both axes at the same time by right-clicking the chart, and using the font menu to change the type size to 12 points.Microsoft Excel 2010 is a very helpful tool for organizing and displaying data. Now I can set the end date to January 1, 2018. To make the year-based axis work better, I'll set the start to January 1, 2012. The data starts in June so that's where Excel has started the axis. To fix, just switch units to something else, then back again to 1 year. That gives us years on the axis, but notice this somehow confuses the Unit settings. Now when I check the axis settings for the horizontal axis, notice that units are now set to months, to better fit this range of data.īack in the first chart, let's clean things up on the horizontal axis.įirst, I'll change the labels to years using number formatting. To illustrate how this works, let me create another chart with a smaller set of the same data, but only include 1 year. If I temporarily switch to text, things change dramatically. Notice bounds have been set automatically based on the 5-year date range, and units are set to years. The axis type is set to automatic, but we can see that it defaults to dates, based on the bounds and units Excel has set as defaults. When I select the horizontal axis, we see category axis settings.īoth value and category axes have settings grouped in 4 areas: Axis options, Tick marks, Labels, and Number. With the vertical axis selected, we see value axis settings. We already customized the value axis, so let's make some changes to the horizontal category axis.įirst, let me point out that axis options are different depending on which axis type is selected.

In a previous video, we created a line chart to show average 30 year mortgage rates over a 5 year period.

To recap, a value axis is used to plot numeric data on a scale, while a category axis is used to group text or dates into specific categories. In this video, we'll look at options for customizing a category axis in an Excel chart.

Change excel graph axis label