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In this guest article, Yoav Ezer shows you how to change the default axis interval in a chart in Microsoft Excel. Find out more about Yoav at the end of this article.

Microsoft Excel is pretty clever and usually the default choices it provides you are good, but sometimes it can be frustrating when it tries to help you and you can not find a way to alter the choices it makes.

Chart axis options are a common example of these frustrations. People often ask us how to override the default Axis Interval. Here is the solution for how to do that.

Say we have a spreadsheet containing daily sales figures.

The chart produced from this data would look like this:

Now, admittedly, that isn’t bad, but we can make the chart much more meaningful if we tweak that axis, right?

This is a little easier to work with I would say. How did we make that tweak?

The trick is to set up your chart then right-click the axis, then on the context menu that appears we click the axis formatting option.

From there you get to choose from lots of options, switching from the automatic defaults to settings you choose.

These are the settings I used above:

Summary

As you can see, while the defaults are not always exactly what we want, Excel usually does allow you to change them. The challenge is often knowing where the settings are hidden!

About the author

Yoav Ezer co-authors the technology and productivity blog Codswallop. He is also the CEO of a company that produces PDF to Excel conversion software.

For more Excel tips from Yoav, join him on Facebook or Twitter

About Rich

Rich is the owner and creator of Windows Guides; he spends his time breaking things on his PC so he can write how-to guides to fix the problems he creates.

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