#Excel 2016 mac move vertical axis how to#
#Excel 2016 mac move vertical axis for mac#
#Excel 2016 mac move vertical axis free#

Help users increase productivity by automatically signing up for TechRepublic’s free Microsoft Office Suite newsletter, featuring Word, Excel, and Access tips, delivered each Wednesday. Now the horizontal axis crosses the vertical axis at 20,000, making it easier to compare data points and read the chart.Ĭheck out the Microsoft Excel archive, and catch up on other Excel tips.

Click the Minimum text box and enter 20000.

Right-click the selected vertical axis.

Click a value in the chart’s vertical axis to select it.

Open the Excel file containing the chart.

Here is a better way to change the automatic axis settings: You can try to make the chart easier to read by resizing and enlarging the chart area, but there will still be a lot of white space at the bottom of the chart. If an Excel chart’s vertical axis is incremented by 20,000, and most of its data points are between 70,000 and 550,000, the chart will look somewhat crowded at the top if the horizontal axis crosses the vertical axis at zero. If you have uneven distribution of data in your Excel chart, here is a better way to change the automatic axis settings. Keep in mind that that you don't have reverse the axis in a case like this.įor example, to get the same result with a bar chart I could simply sort the source data, smallest to largest.Change an Excel chart’s minimum axis value for a cleaner look In the Data section, locate and click on the Switch Row/Column button to have Excel switch the axes of the selected chart. To reset the axis to it's default, visit axis options again and set the axis crossing to automatic, and untick the reverse order checkbox. Now, if I switch back to a column chart, the reversed axis comes along too. To fix this problem, you'll want to set the horizontal axis to cross at the maximum value. So when I reverse the order, the axis moves along with Cuba. This is confusing, but the gist is that the horizontal axis is set to cross at the minimum or first value by default, which is Cuba in this case. Notice it also moves the horizontal axis to the right. When I check the box, Excel reverses the plot order. There, near the bottom, you'll see a checkbox called 'values in reverse order'.

To make this change, right-click and open up axis options in the Format Task pane. Luckily, Excel includes controls for quickly switching the order of axis values. It's the layout of the bar chart that makes it look like the data is reversed, since the values are plotted from the bottom to the top. The first value is plotted next to the origin, and subsequent values move away from the origin. Now, what happens if I change this chart to a bar chart?Īt first you might think that Excel changed the sort order of the axis labels.īut, if you look closely, the order is the same. The main thing to understand here is that the category labels start next to the origin, and each new value is plotted further away from the origin.

#Excel 2016 mac move vertical axis for mac#

the column section on the Insert tab (or Charts tab in Excel for Mac 2011). In this case, the first column is Cuba, and the last is Barbados, so the columns match the order of the source data moving moving top to bottom.Ī line chart and area chart don't make sense for this data, but if I temporarily try them out, you can see the plot order stays the same. The first column contains the values for the horizontal xaxis and it must. When Excel plots data in a column chart, the labels run from left to right to left. Let me insert a standard column chart and let's look at how Excel plots the data. Here we have data for the top 10 islands in the Caribbean by population.

#Excel 2016 mac move vertical axis how to#

In this video, we'll look at how to reverse the order of a chart axis.