Can you include only certain months in x-axis labels?

[freckleberry23]

Hi,

I have a plot with hundreds of data points between 1992 and 2016. I am trying to show the seasonal variation in the data and want to only show the x-axis date labels say for Jan and Jun for each of the years between 1992 and 2016. However this cannot be achieved by simply changing the major axis label unit (I have tried...). Is there a way you can only show select months on the x-axis, whilst still plotting all other data points in between?

Appreciate your help in advance!!

 

[Gerald Higgins]

Hi, welcome to the board.

Here's one way, there are probably other ways.

Set up your data like this with two columns

Jan....Jan
Feb...[blank]
Mar...[blank]
Apr...[blank]
May...[blank]
Jun...Jun
Jul...[blank]

and so on.

Then, make the second column be the source data for your X axis range.

COMMENT - with this method, you can select whichever months you like to appear, but I would suggest NOT using Jan and Jun only, as these are months 1 and 6, leaving you with 4 empty months followed by 6 empty months. I would suggest using Jan / Jul, OR Dec / Jun.

 

[freckleberry23]

Thanks Gerald!!

I gave it a go and your method definitely worked. The only slight intricacy was that as my plot was an XY scatter plot, I had to overlay the same data in column format (i.e. a combined column and scatter plot) so that the dominating axis labels was from the columns. This method would allow me to show whichever months I wanted.