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33 Responses to “Show Months & Years in Charts without Cluttering”

1. eladberko says:

   November 17, 2010 at 11:56 am

   Very CooOOOoool 🙂

   Reply
2. JP says:

   November 17, 2010 at 1:41 pm

   Would it work if I merely change the display format for the dates, or do they actually need to be retyped in that format (Nov, Dec, etc)?

   ps- it's only about 34 donuts per month, or slightly more than 1 per day. Yum!

   Reply
3. Jon Peltier says:

   November 17, 2010 at 2:14 pm

   To make it work automatically when you create a chart, delete the labels above the Year and Month columns, but keep the label above the Y data (Donuts). The blank cells tell Excel that the first row and first two columns (indicated by the blanks) are special, so it uses the first row for series names an the first two columns for X axis labels.
    
   This is better than the other kind of donut chart, but you'll soon be carrying a big donut around your midsection.

   Reply
4. Erin Smith says:

   November 18, 2010 at 12:02 am

   First off, thank you Chandoo for being respectful and taking out the "Jesus" comment. Not that I'd threaten to kill you, or start world-wide riots, or make you go into hiding if you didn't (as OTHERS would; wink, wink, nudge, nudge)... I just really appreciate your respectulness and consideration; so thank you. I was meaning to write you about it, but when I came to your site you'd already made the edit... so again, thank you!

   Secondly, I wanna say I think there's an easier way to do what you are demonstrating. I've got a pivot chart with months of data and all I had to do was right-click the x axis and then select "format axis", under "Axis Options" there's a check-box that says "Multi-level Category Labels". The chart I was able to do this on was a pivotchart however so maybe it wouldn't be that easy for a non-pivotchart.

   Anyway, love the site. Keep up the good work. Thanks also for being so open about your success, it's very encouraging and motivating.

   God (aka Jesus) Bless. 🙂

   Reply
5. Terry Dukes says:

   November 18, 2010 at 1:44 am

   Hi Chandoo - great site! Another option to save space is to simply rotate the orientation of the text by 90 degrees, so the dates read vertical rather than horizontal. However, I like the elegance of your solution also.

   Reply
6. Kien Leong says:

   November 18, 2010 at 3:23 am

   Hey Chandoo -- Great tip. Only yesterday I was working through some strange behaviour with formatting dates in PivotCharts. Seems the axes never want to cooperate. This is a neat and elegant solution I hadn't thought of using. May need to abandon pivotcharts to use formulas like that, but if we use dynamic named ranges, no big sacrifice.

   BTW, whatever did you do to get your site blocked in China? Never heard of regime change by a grass-root spreadsheet movement. Maybe your ISP is hosting some problem sites. Chandoo.org is certainly worth it for me to fire up the VPN, but I'm sure you would lose a lot of other visitors from the middle kingdom.

   Reply
7. Kapil says:

   November 18, 2010 at 3:48 am

   Chandoo ... pls help.. the link is blocked over here... pls can you put the regular link... 🙂

   Reply
8. Chandoo says:

   November 18, 2010 at 4:27 am

   @JP... Excel Axis formatting is linked to cell formatting by default. So you can just have the dates which are formatted to look like months (mmm).

   @Erin: It was not my intention to mock anyone's faith or religion. I just used the word as it is quite common. I decided to remove it as I got 2 emails from readers requesting for the same.

   Also, the pivot charts take pivot table groupings by default, so you need not do any of the above while making charts from pivot tables.

   @Kein: I am not sure why Chinese authorities decided to block my site. I wish they would actually look at the content instead of blocking sites based on simple text matching rules.

   @Kapil: The file is mirrored here: http://chandoo.org/img/d/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls

   Reply
9. Prateek says:

   November 18, 2010 at 4:51 am

   Cool, really cool...

   Reply
10. SS says:

    November 18, 2010 at 4:58 am

    Nice one Chandoo,

    Also would like to mention abt useful method while creating dynamic charts.

    In any chart where in the months keep on adding - instead of changing the range for the chart every time we add a month, we can actually format the months as dates (probably 1st of every month) still keep the format as "mmm" AND while selecting the data, we can select a huge rows (date column) once and for all, and the chart adjusts automatically with the data that we entered. So next month when I enter Dec's data, I need not change the source data of the chart, however it automatically adjusts.

    Hope I made sense.!

    Regards,
    SS

    Reply
11. Tom says:

    November 18, 2010 at 1:38 pm

    Thanks, Chandoo! This is a great tip - one that I will definitely put to use. I typically have an axis with mmm yy format, aligned vertically, but this will definitely look a bit cleaner (except in cases where the chart is too small for the axis labels to be displayed horizontally, even without the mmm yy on one line). Thanks again!

    Tom

    Reply
12. Josh says:

    November 18, 2010 at 6:23 pm

    Chandoo,
    Thank you for the posts you are very diligent not to mention very helpful. I would like to know how to get the separation lines on the axis? For example your candy sales chart has longer lines separating east and west how do you format that?

    Thanks for being very awesome!
    -Josh

    Reply
13. Alvaro says:

    November 19, 2010 at 4:15 am

    Hi Chandoo, we can look the formulas because there is a message:"Unsupported features".
    Could you send a diferent Link ?
    Thanks.

    Reply
14. Matt says:

    December 2, 2010 at 6:46 pm

    @SS But what if you've got formulas in the data block (i.e where you would enter static data for the month of december)? My chart now shows #N/A #N/A in the axis with no data for all future dates.

    Chandoo, I've got a dynamic range set up showing #N/A errors for future dates. The MMM-DD date format format in row works fine, but when I use YYYY and MMM in two rows, the axis shows #N/A #N/A for all future dates with no data. How would you go about keeping those future months hidden?

    Reply
15. Jon Peltier says:

    December 3, 2010 at 12:19 pm

    Matt -

    In order for the axis to automatically extend to the dates within the range and ignore #N/A at the end, you need a date-scale axis, and for this you need to use one column with the complete date, not two columns with year and month.

    If you want to use two columns, you need to generate Names in the worksheet which define ranges only as long as the number of months. I have a review of dynamic chart approaches in http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/dynamic-chart-review/ and a whole category on my blog at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/category/dynamic-charts/. Chandoo also has examples of his own on this site.

    Reply
16. Ethan says:

    December 11, 2010 at 6:42 pm

    How do you make a dynamic chart out of this?
    I can't get the axis labels range right.
    I tried something like this:
    =OFFSET(REPORT!$H$10:$I$10;0;0;COUNTA(REPORT!$H$10:$I$100);1)

    Any idea?

    Reply
17. Jon Peltier says:

    December 12, 2010 at 2:18 am

    Ethan -
     
    Your offset formula defines a range 1 row in size, but the technique here requires 2 rows. Your definition should end with
     
    ;2)
     
    instead of
     
    ;1)

    Reply
18. Ethan says:

    December 12, 2010 at 8:19 am

    Thanks Jon,
    Got it working now

    Reply
19. Neal says:

    January 18, 2011 at 5:36 am

    Great! Now, is there any way to do this directly in Powerpoint? I don't like having linked excel files, so I create the graphs right inside Powerpoint, any way to do this there? I tried and was unsuccessful.

    Thanks.

    Reply
20. Joe says:

    April 2, 2012 at 6:41 am

    Cool tip Chandoo......thanks

    Reply
21. Add buy and sell points to a stock chart | Get Digital Help - Microsoft Excel resource says:

    June 27, 2012 at 2:56 pm

    [...] extract year and month from dates to avoid a mess in our stock chart. Chandoo has a great post: Show Months & Years in Charts without ClutteringIn cell B2:=YEAR(D2)In cell B3:=IF(YEAR(D3)=YEAR(D2), "", YEAR(D3))Cell C2:=IF(TEXT(D2, [...]

    Reply
22. Bilal says:

    October 9, 2013 at 2:14 pm

    Hi there,
    I have got a data ranging for 3 years. I want to show a chart which shows Jan of 2011, 2012 and 2013 together side by side; then Feb11, Feb12 and Feb13 side by side, then Mar11, Mar12 and Mar13, and so on until December.
    Please help. Thanks.

    Reply
    • Hui... says:

      October 9, 2013 at 11:55 pm

      @Bilal

      Do you want a number of charts next to each other as separate charts or the data next to each other in a single chart?

      What type of chart were you thinking about?

      Can you post your data for us to review?
      Refer upload instructions at: http://chandoo.org/forum/threads/posting-a-sample-workbook.451/

      Reply
23. Down With This Sort Of Thing says:

    October 15, 2013 at 5:12 pm

    Hi there

    Very good solution this. I have another question on it, though. How do you format the X-axis with monthly gaps (ie, with labels "Jan 2012", "Apr", "Jul", "Oct", "Jan 2013", "Mar", etc), when you're dealing with a data series with weekly or daily data points? The Axis Options dialogue box doesn't appear to offer "Date axis" as an option under the "Axis Type" section.

    I've managed to do it in one case with weekly data by setting the interval between tick marks at 13 -- the approximate number of weeks in a quarter -- to get 3-month intervals. But this wouldn't work if I wanted to show 1-month intervals, or had a more detailed daily data series to work with.

    Reply
24. Herro says:

    January 20, 2015 at 2:49 pm

    Any luck getting the dates to work on a scatter graph? I'm only getting numbers. Works fine on line graphs though.

    Reply
25. Apoorve says:

    April 30, 2015 at 1:56 pm

    How can we do the vice versa? i.e. on the x-axis showing year on the level 1, and months on level 2.
    I wanted to build these kind of axis labels for 5 years, with year on top and months at the bottom, but it should form in such a way that the seperating lines should seperate the entire data set only at December of each year, and no lines in between any month.

    Reply
    • Hui... says:

      April 30, 2015 at 2:47 pm

      @Apoorve
      Just re-arrange the columns
      You need to put a space in all cells where you don't want a year
      See the attached file
      http://chandoo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Chart-for-Apoorve.xlsx

      Unfortunately you don't get any control over lines its all or nothing.

      Reply
26. scipion says:

    June 17, 2015 at 2:56 pm

    Hello - the link seems to be broken:
    http://cid-b663e096d6c08c74.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls

    Regards.

    Reply
27. Carlos says:

    June 21, 2016 at 6:48 pm

    Like!!
    Three times already today I have used this website and saved a ton of work time in researching excel tricks.

    Suggestion: Why not have a "like" or "this article was useful to me" button. That way you can see what is most useful by your users and maybe generate more content based on those "likes".

    Just saying. Thanks again and you're doing a great job!

    Reply
28. Haj says:

    March 28, 2017 at 10:47 pm

    Thanks for the tip. However, I couldn't download your file. The link is broken.

    Reply
29. JeteMc says:

    June 26, 2017 at 2:37 pm

    Thank You for taking the time to post this tip. I hope that you have a blessed day.

    Reply
30. Tom says:

    November 16, 2020 at 2:09 pm

    The link does not work properly and I'm not sure how to actually get the graph to display like this, its frustrating me a tonne. I cant work out what to google either to find an answer elsewhere! 🙁

    Reply
31. parag says:

    June 18, 2021 at 3:00 pm

    Is this possible with waterfall chart. Data hereunder -

    Years Abbrevation Amt

    2020 BEG 2,006
    REV 1,950
    EMP 1,058
    DM (3,244)
    OOE 1,078
    OPMT 182
    AB (638)
    END 2,392
    2021 REV 8,534
    EMP 67
    DM (2,142)
    OOE (3,120)
    OPMT 510
    AB 1,008
    END 7,249

    Reply

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