Excel Charts - Question about X-Axis Labels

[au2010]

I am creating a line chart in Excel based on 4 columns of data. The first column (the x-axis values) contains week-ending dates, and the other columns are Sales-Unit 1, Sales-Unit 2, and Sales-Total. There are 156 rows of data. I had no problem creating and formatting this chart except for one thing: I cannot get the x-axis data labels to display EVERY period; only every OTHER period is displayed.

In Format Axis > Axis Options > Labels, I specified the "interval unit" as 1, but this seemed to have no effect - only every OTHER period is displayed. I also changed the font to 6-point, but that also did not fix the problem. I changed the dates from numerical dates to text, but that also did not work.

Maybe there are just too many data points for Excel to display each on individually? I can't think of what else could cause this. Any suggestions appreciated.

Excel version: 2016.

Thank you.

 

[mrshl9898]

If you make the chart wider, to an impractical size i'm assuming it will show it all. Just sounds like as you suspected too many data points, excel won't overlap the text but reduce what is shown.

 

[Jon Peltier]

Yeah, Excel has ideas of its own. As soon as you have more than 100 category labels, you cannot show them all. Even when I made the chart 25 inches wide, with 101 categories, I couldn't show all of them on the axis, even though there was space. This has been the case since Excel 2007.

You can at least register your displeasure. Click the smiley face on the ribbon (depending on your version of Excel) and send a frown. Say you want to show every axis label, but that it only shows every two labels. I'm going to do just that right now.

Actually, send a frown for everything that bothers you. They do see them all, and sometimes they respond.

 

[au2010]

Thank-you to both commenters. Even making my chart impractically wide (3 screen widths) didn't help. As Jon said, Excel appears to have ideas of its own on this one. I will definitely try to send the frowny face if I can find that in my version.

One thing I noticed: when I have an ODD number of data labels, the every-other-label display at least shows the label for the final data point, which is somewhat better, because at least it doesn't give the appearance of having cut off the last row of data. But when I have an EVEN number of data labels, the last label (the last even-numbered one) isn't displayed, making it look as if the last row of data has been omitted (even though it actually hasn't been). I suppose what Excel is doing when there are >100 labels is just displaying the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc labels and suppressing the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc.