How can I horizontally space data points on a chart when the dates are arbitrary?

Question

Say I have events that occur on sporadic dates, like this:

Date	Qty
2022-01-01	100
2022-02-08	200
2022-06-17	150
2022-08-03	700
2023-01-27	300

I have rows for arbitrary days in Jan, Feb, June, Aug this year, and Jan next year. I could even have multiple entries in a single month.

I want to insert a chart with the dates on the horizontal axis, and quantities on the vertical axis. The horizontal gap between data points should be proportional to the number of days in between each row of data. Something like:

                            700
                                ---- 
                          /           ---- 
                                           ---- 300
                        /
    200 ------         
   /          ----- 150
100
---------------------------------------------------
Jan Feb             Jun     Aug                 Jan

Is this possible, without having to insert empty rows into the table for every month where there is no data?

As far as I can tell, by default google sheets is spacing each data point equally across the X axis, regardless of how far apart the dates are. Here is a screenshot showing what I mean:

Note that the columns are evenly spaced. In the data though, columns 1 & 2 are ~one month apart, while columns 2 & 3 are ~four months apart. I want the columns to be spaced accordingly.

Answer 1

You want the horizontal gap between data points to be proportional to the number of days in between each row of data.

---

This is the result of the standard chart layout.

5 data elements

This is the chart created using five data elements.

---

362 data elements

This is the chart created by including a value for every day between 1 Jan 2021 and 27 Jan 2023. Data

Chart Changes requires for this chart:

• Customize, Chart Style, check "Plot Null Values"
• Customize, Grid lines and ticks, select "Horizontal Axis", set "Major count" = 10.

Answer 2

I know it is a late response, but for those searching for the answer as I just did:

This is possible and automatically done if you choose Line Chart, Area Chart, and their "Stacked" variations. It doesn't work with Combo Charts and Bar Charts.

Answer 3

Thank you to Tedinoz for the link to Discrete vs Continuous.

Once I discovered this link, I solved the issue I'd had for several hours within a matter of minutes.

The link makes it clear that

In line, area, bar, column and candlestick charts (and combo charts containing only such series), you can control the type of the major axis:

For a discrete axis, set the data column type to string. For a continuous axis, set the data column type to one of: number, date, datetime or timeofday

Now realising that this was actually possible, I experimented and discovered that you need to UNCHECK the box that says "treat labels as text" at the bottom of the Chart Editor -> Setup tab. By unchecking this box, Google Sheets interprets your x-axis values as continuous, at which point the axis becomes uniformly distributed in time/date/number.

It seems that for the chart type that I had (Stacked Column Chart), the default behaviour is to treat labels as strings, which is understandable.