I have a very basic issue. How can I change the x-axis of a line chart to show years in the following way:
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 ...
When I click on formatting x-axis I can only choose from Automatic, Text, Date. None of them helps me with what I want.
The chart is presented below:
In the format x-axis dialog go to dialog page “Numbers”. Uncheck “Source Format” and enter the format code for years manually, which is YYYY for English language.
If the automatic does not detect, that your labels are years, use the dialog page “Scale” to explicitly set the field “Type” to item “Date”. If it is still wrong, check whether your data has really dates as labels.
You can also change the chart from line to x-y-scatter. Use the years as x-axis. The years will be displayed as labels on the x-axis.
Thanks horst. Your answer is correct. I was simply using the wrong chart type to plot years.
Additionally, to @regina’s excellent advice, does your data table has a column (or row) with the year number in it? If so is the column (or row) identified as x-axis value? I recommend to check this.
This just adds a bit of detail to @ROSt53’s answer. I had a hard time figuring this out (and got stumped at the same point you did!), but in the chart wizard it came in the second step:
The “trick” was to ensure that the text for the intended labels was in the first row/column of the selected area of cells to be plotted on the chart. That did it for me.