Format Axis Alignment, Autofit greyout

[jfish1288]

Just upgraded from Excel 2002 to Excel 2010.

I have a chart with dates on the x-axis and values on the y-axis. The problem is that the date labels (that doesn't seem like quite the correct term, I am referring to the text under each tick mark) overlap and cannot be read. I need to rotate the labels 90 (or 270) degrees so that they are vertical and can be read easily. When I do this by right clicking "Format Axis", choosing "Alignment", and changing "Text direction" to "Rotate all text 270 degrees" I run into the problem that half of the date label is cut off and I have to manually resize the chart area. It appears that this problem could be solved by simply changing the selection under "Autofit" from "Allow text to overflow shape" to "Resize shape to fit text", but the "Autofit" section is greyed-out and I can not change the selection. Any thoughts as to why I can not change the autofit?

Also the 2002 Excel Help file, while not great, was nice because it was fairly simple and direct explanations generically written by Microsoft. 2010 seems to me to be not much more than a web search engine and I am finding it rather unhelpful. Is there anything more equivalent to the old version of the help?

 

[Rower21]

Just upgraded from Excel 2002 to Excel 2010.

I have a chart with dates on the x-axis and values on the y-axis. The problem is that the date labels (that doesn't seem like quite the correct term, I am referring to the text under each tick mark) overlap and cannot be read. I need to rotate the labels 90 (or 270) degrees so that they are vertical and can be read easily. When I do this by right clicking "Format Axis", choosing "Alignment", and changing "Text direction" to "Rotate all text 270 degrees" I run into the problem that half of the date label is cut off and I have to manually resize the chart area. It appears that this problem could be solved by simply changing the selection under "Autofit" from "Allow text to overflow shape" to "Resize shape to fit text", but the "Autofit" section is greyed-out and I can not change the selection. Any thoughts as to why I can not change the autofit?

Also the 2002 Excel Help file, while not great, was nice because it was fairly simple and direct explanations generically written by Microsoft. 2010 seems to me to be not much more than a web search engine and I am finding it rather unhelpful. Is there anything more equivalent to the old version of the help?

I have the EXACT same issue. My x-axis label is rotated 90 degrees for readability (Dates MM/DD/YYYY are too long to read as axis labels without rotation). Under Format Axis>Alignment>Autofit the options are greyed out and "Allow text to overflow shape" is selected by default so all of my lables are cut off by the chart border. If I were able to "resize shape to fit text" (currently greyed out) that would fix the issue. Clicking and dragging the chart borders to make the chart bigger does nothing to help as the inner part of the chart expands proportionally to the size of the exterior chart border, so the axis continues to overflow beyond the boundaries of the shape and cannot be read.

I can't find any help in this. Anyone?

 

[fanthom]

Format Axis > Axis Options> Labels > Label Position > Select: Low