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Otherwise, leave this at "one" and every tick mark displays on the axis, whether it has a label or not.Ĭlick "Close" to close the Format Axis window and apply the changes to your chart. So if you enter "three" into this box, the first, fourth, seventh and tenth - continuing until you run out of labels - display.Ĭlick on the text box next to "Interval between tick marks." Enter the same number as your interval unit if you only want Excel to show a tick on the axis when it displays a label. The first axis label displays, then Excel skips labels until the number of your interval, and continues on in this pattern. Type in the interval that you want to use for the X-axis labels. The Format Axis window appears.Ĭlick on the radio button next to "Specify interval unit," then place your cursor into the small text box next to the button. Click the "Format Selection" button next to the drop-down arrow to continue. However, we can just as easily change the y-axis scale by right-clicking on any of the values on the y-axis and performing the same steps as above.Click on the "Layout" tab at the top of the Excel window, then click the drop-down arrow on the left side of the ribbon and choose "Horizontal (Category) Axis" from the list of options. Note that in these examples, we chose to change only the x-axis scale. Related: When Should You Use a Log Scale in Charts? The x-axis will automatically be updated to use a logarithmic scale: In the Format Axis panel, simply check the box next to Logarithmic scale: Instead of changing the minimum and maximum bounds, we could also choose to use a logarithmic scale for the axis instead. Notice that the x-axis now ranges from 0 to 50. Once we press Enter, the x-axis scale will automatically be updated on the plot: In the Format Axis panel that appears on the right side of the screen, change the values in the Minimum and Maximum boxes to change the scale of the x-axis.įor example, we could change the Maximum value of the x-axis to 50: In the dropdown menu that appears, click Format Axis: To change the scale of the x-axis, simply right click on any of the values on the x-axis. In this example, we can see that the x-axis ranges from 0 to 20 and the y-axis ranges from 0 to 30. The following scatterplot will automatically be created:īy default, Excel will choose a scale for the x-axis and y-axis that ranges roughly from the minimum to maximum values in each column. Then click the Insert tab along the top ribbon and then click the Scatter option within the Charts group: Next, highlight the cells in the range A2:B16. 2 click the Size & Properties button in the Format.
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Step 1: Enter the Dataįirst, let’s enter a simple dataset into Excel: Rotate Axis labels 1 right click on the X Axis label, and select Format Axis from the popup menu list. This tutorial provides a step-by-step example of how to change the x-axis and y-axis scales on plots in Excel.
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