Click the edit button to access the label range. Here you'll see the horizontal axis labels listed on the right. Instead you'll need to open up the Select Data window. You won't find controls for overwriting text labels in the Format Task pane. Let's say we want to label these batches using the letters A though F. The dates still appear, but now they're plotted at equal intervals. This immediately gets rid of the gaps, since Excel is no longer plotting these dates across the full date range. So, the first thing I'll do is set the axis type to text. This happens because Excel automatically sets the axis type to date, which makes sense since we have dates in the data. The first thing you probably notice is that there are some gaps in the columns. Let me insert a standard column chart, and let's run through some options in adjusting the labels that appear in the horizontal category axis. We have a date, quantity, and a field to indicate batch number. Here we have a simple set of generic shipping data. In this video, we'll look at some examples of formatting axis labels.

Excel 2016 chart axis labels angle