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March 3, 2021
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Hi, I have a number of Excel spreadsheets that are all having the same problem with their charts.
I created a couple of (what I think are) simple summary tables with Months in the X-axis formatted as "mmm", and recently started showing the months as Jan, Jan, Jan... instead of Jan, Feb, Mar... and if I change the format in the X-Axis to Number it shows 1, 2, 3... rather than a number of days like 43739.
It doesn't seem to make a difference if use 'Select Data...' delete the series and reselect the range. I do want to keep my formatting though so if I create a new chart from scratch the dates appear to correctly show the month, and copy-and-paste-special the formatting of the chart with the formatting I want, the month axis goes back to Jan, Jan, Jan...
What can I do to fix the formatting issue without having to recreate all the charts from scratch (there are many dozens of them)?
I am using Office Professional Plus 2016 on a quad-core 16GB lenovo laptop.
Thanks and regards, Chris Warren
(see attached example worksheet)
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November 1, 2018
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There's no attached worksheet but it sounds like more than a formatting issue. Your category values have actually gone missing and you've ended up with the default 1,2,3 etc. How that happened, I couldn't say but you need to reset the category axis label ranges for the charts.
March 3, 2021
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I'm sure I attached an example, I'll retry...
July 16, 2010
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Hi Chris,
Looks like the dates in rows 1 and 9 are corrupted in some way. I copied the dates to new cells and pasted as values, formatted as dates, then changed the chart to reference these new cells. Then cut and pasted the dates back to their original location, and that seemed to fix the problem.
Mynda
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November 1, 2018
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That definitely looks like a bug to me. If you right click the chart, Select Data, and edit the category labels to make them point somewhere else, then clear that and point them back at the original cells, it clears the issue even though nothing has changed on the sheet!
Even weirder, if you look at the stored XML for the charts, the correct axis values are in there.
VIP
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June 25, 2016
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I suspect is is a date setting issue (US vs UK date format).
All your dates start with 1. If the date is US then all your months will be Jan.
March 3, 2021
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Thanks everyone for your replies. Happy their is a workaround to fix this. While Excel does have it's occasional quirk, I've never seen anything like this before, and I'm so glad I wasn't doing something obvious and stupid. 😉
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