#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC HOW TO#
#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC UPDATE#
#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC FULL#
#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC PC#

And if you already created the chart from the table, all is not lost. This is another benefit to formatting your data as a table before charting it out - the ability to sort is built into the filters baked into every table heading. However, in the chart below, which is sorted in descending order, it’s easy to sort and interpret because it’s basically done for you. If you look at the data in the chart immediately below, I think you’ll agree that your eyes have to dart back and forth to sort the channels by revenue. If you’re showing something sequential, like visits per day over a period of a month or revenue per month over a period of a year, then ordering your data chronologically makes the most sense. In the absence of a dominant sort pattern like that, I’m of the opinion that data should be ordered and presented in descending order to put the most significant data first. Charts that are spawned from unsorted data are, in my opinion, much more difficult to read and interpret. I always choose Above Chart (Mac: Chart at Top). On the Mac, you’ll choose Charts > Chart Layout > Labels > Chart Title. To add a chart title, with your chart selected, choose Chart Tools > Layout > Labels > Chart Title. So, in the case of the chart below, it would be insufficient to just use “Impressions” as the chart title: But for others who have to try to figure out what you’re trying to communicate, it’s not always so apparent. When you’re the one pulling together the data, everything you’re trying to communicate is perfectly clear. Finally, select Line Color > No line (Mac: Line > Solid > Color: No Line).Ī common mistake I see with marketers’ charts is they’re oftentimes missing a title. In this case, you’ll just want to select one of the gridlines in your chart (anyone but the top one, which selects the entire plot area) and then open the formatting options. First, remember the formatting trick I mention in all of my posts: if you want to format anything in Excel (in a chart or table) just select it and press Ctrl-1 (Mac: Command-1) to open the formatting dialog specific to that item. And that’s the problem with noise: it distracts you from the essential stuff. But then, they cause my eye to stumble, too.

And yet, until I viewed this presentation by Ian Lurie, I was blissfully oblivious to gridlines in charts. If you have read just about anything I’ve written about Excel, you’ll know I loathe gridlines in tables. When you’re presenting data, it’s very important to reduce the noise and hone in on actionable signals. Remove Noise From Your Chart’s Background

#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC PC#

If you want a primer, you can find this resource from Microsoft for the PC and this one for the Mac. I’m not going to cover the basics of creating charts in this post.

#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC HOW TO#

This affects all text labels at the same time.Having covered all the basics of how to make tabular data tell a story using custom cell formatting and conditional formatting for both static tables and pivot tables, we’re now going to jump into the really fun stuff: charting data out in Excel. To make this change, format the axis and go to the Number area, then apply a number format with commas for thousands, and no decimal places.įinally, I'll select the chart, and bump up the font size. Now, on the vertical axis, one change we can make is to use commas for thousands.

#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC UPDATE#

Then I'll update the chart to use that label instead. For this, I'll use the TEXT function and the ampersand for concatenation. Next, I'm going to create a new label that concatenates the batch with the date. I just need to use select data again and point to that range. But, since we have some suitable labels in the batch column, we could just use those instead.

So that's how you can use completely custom labels. It's not obvious, but you can type arbitrary labels separated with commas in this field. Click the edit button to access the label range. Here you'll see the horizontal axis labels listed on the right. Instead you'll need to open up the Select Data window. You won't find controls for overwriting text labels in the Format Task pane. Let's say we want to label these batches using the letters A though F. The dates still appear, but now they're plotted at equal intervals.

#MAKE AXIS TITLES IN EXCEL FOR MAC FULL#

This immediately gets rid of the gaps, since Excel is no longer plotting these dates across the full date range. So, the first thing I'll do is set the axis type to text. This happens because Excel automatically sets the axis type to date, which makes sense since we have dates in the data. The first thing you probably notice is that there are some gaps in the columns. Let me insert a standard column chart, and let's run through some options in adjusting the labels that appear in the horizontal category axis. We have a date, quantity, and a field to indicate batch number. Here we have a simple set of generic shipping data. In this video, we'll look at some examples of formatting axis labels.

Make axis titles in excel for mac