Ricardo has a chart and wants to show the monthly label for every third month. This leaves a big gap at the end. Today, in Episode #1419, Bill shows us a workaround solution for this problem.
Transcript of the video:
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Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast, episode 1419: month chart labels.
Well, hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I’m Bill Jelen.
Today's question is sent in by Ricardo.
Ricardo has a chart with 12 months of data.
He’s trying to get a lot of stuff to fit in there and so one of the things he did is he took the month labels and he made it show only every third label.
So, we go to-- right-click, choose format axis and then over here, major unit, we're going to change from auto to fixed and say we want to show only every third month.
Click OK, close and see then what we get is we get, you know, basically every quarter, but we're missing the label for the last month.
Ricardo said, “I tried a lot of different things: every two months, every four months.
There's just really no good way to get this.” Well, you know, the solution that I've seen is go to your manager and say, hey, I understand you want to see one year's worth of data in this chart, but it would really be useful to see the current month from the last year.
So, if we're ending in August 2011, let's end in-- I’ll start with August 2010.
That way it gives you a comparable month.
All right, so I added a new month up here.
We'll just drag this to the lower right.
There we go.
The beautiful thing about having 13 months-- now, we told your manager so that way, they can have a comp month.
They can see, you know, this month versus the last month.
The beautiful thing is it allows that setting to work, where you see the first month and the last month.
So, you know, no matter what you tell your manager, the real reason for that is just to get the month labels to work.
I haven't found anything better.
Otherwise, you're going to have that gap out there or if you add a dummy month without any data, then it shows up without any data.
So, it's just-- convince your manager you're doing a good thing for him to show him the 13 months.
That way he has a comparable for the most recent month.
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast, episode 1419: month chart labels.
Well, hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I’m Bill Jelen.
Today's question is sent in by Ricardo.
Ricardo has a chart with 12 months of data.
He’s trying to get a lot of stuff to fit in there and so one of the things he did is he took the month labels and he made it show only every third label.
So, we go to-- right-click, choose format axis and then over here, major unit, we're going to change from auto to fixed and say we want to show only every third month.
Click OK, close and see then what we get is we get, you know, basically every quarter, but we're missing the label for the last month.
Ricardo said, “I tried a lot of different things: every two months, every four months.
There's just really no good way to get this.” Well, you know, the solution that I've seen is go to your manager and say, hey, I understand you want to see one year's worth of data in this chart, but it would really be useful to see the current month from the last year.
So, if we're ending in August 2011, let's end in-- I’ll start with August 2010.
That way it gives you a comparable month.
All right, so I added a new month up here.
We'll just drag this to the lower right.
There we go.
The beautiful thing about having 13 months-- now, we told your manager so that way, they can have a comp month.
They can see, you know, this month versus the last month.
The beautiful thing is it allows that setting to work, where you see the first month and the last month.
So, you know, no matter what you tell your manager, the real reason for that is just to get the month labels to work.
I haven't found anything better.
Otherwise, you're going to have that gap out there or if you add a dummy month without any data, then it shows up without any data.
So, it's just-- convince your manager you're doing a good thing for him to show him the 13 months.
That way he has a comparable for the most recent month.
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
