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I have a chart with dates along the X axis, but the chart displays them quite close together, producing a rather ugly graph. How might I reduce the number of visible labels to increase the readability a little?
Edit: Sheet in question https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P4sTn6YOp_747Gc5nCF34af1MN3AjhO0wRj85FjAqkA/edit?usp=sharing
Answer:
... -> Edit chart -> Customize -> Gridlines -> Horizontal Axis (in drop down) -> Major gridline count
Under the Major gridline count you can select or type however many dates you want to see on the horizontal label here, for auto mine shows up with a reasonable number of dates but if you wanted to see 20 dates or 10 dates you can type 20 or 10 here respectively.
Note: if you do not see Horizontal Axis under gridlines you need to go to
Customize -> Vertical axis
make sure Treat labels as text is unchecked.
in your specific example dd-mm-yyyy is not a recognized 2014-04-24 date format so use the following formula to fix that, paste in cell F1 for example :
={"DateFormat";arrayformula(if(B2:B="","",date(index(split(B2:B,"-"),,3),index(split(B2:B,"-"),,2),index(split(B2:B,"-"),,1))))}
(make sure to Format->Number->Date on this entire new column F)
Bonus: Depending on how you want to present the data you can also create a fake label column to display important dates you want in various ways.
For example you can put this formula in G1 in conjunction with the note above
={"NotedDates";arrayformula(if(E2:E="","",F2:F))}
which will create a list of dates you can use as a text label to only display important dates, however with the amount of points you have in your data you have to stretch the chart out way larger than the web page to be able to display that information because google sheets is randomly deciding which label to omit because of size constraints.
Horizontal Axis isn't displaying, and under Under Customize -> Vertical Axis I don't have a Treat labels as text: i.imgur.com/VjoouLv.png
Nov 17, 2019 at 21:28
After a lot of searching, this comment from glenviewjeff had the answer I was looking for - Leaving breadcrumbs for myself and hopefully it will help others. It's a fairly complicated process. I started with a more complex chart for historical reasons. I had to modify my chart to get it to work. I moved around the columns on the "setup" tab of the chart such that the x-axis was the right data, and there was only one column for the "series." I changed the chart to be a simple "column chart." I checked the "use column A as labels" box (column A are dates for the horizontal axis in my case.) and unchecked "treat labels as text."
The breadcrumbs definitely helped. TL;DR - change it to a column chart, and uncheck "treat labels as text.". Viola!
Thank you glenviewjeff!
Note: if you're working with a date and a time, this won't work. Simply format the datetime column as just a date and all of the options mentioned in the answers will work.
