Change Horizontal Axis Values in Excel

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to change data labels on the x-axis in Excel charts. This procedure is a bit different in Excel 365 and other newer versions than it is in Excel 2016 and versions before that.

Changing x-axis values with dates

This example shows a chart with the Amount series on the y-axis and the Date on the x-axis.

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To replace one series with another, you need to have a corresponding data series. In our case, we are going to use the index for months.

What you need to do now is to highlight values on the x-axis, right-click and from the context menu click Select Data.

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Now, inside Select Data Source, you can click Edit inside the Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels.

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Inside Axis label range, click the up arrow and select range with month indexes (C2:C21), instead of dates. Press Enter.

To the right side of the range, there are the first few numbers from the x-axis. As you can see, the values were successfully modified.

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Click OK to close Axis Labels and click OK one more time to close the Select Data Source window.

Now, the horizontal values are changed inside the chart.

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Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.