Excel Video 79 reviews some of the options for formatting the Horizontal Axis on charts. It’s easy to reverse the order of categories on the axis (from Dr. D to Dr. A and vice versa) and to hide the horizontal axis if you need to. Many of the Axis Options for the Horizontal Axis relate to tick marks, the small lines that appear between categories on the axis. You can control how often the tick marks appear, add major and minor tick marks, control where the tick marks appear (above, below, or crossing the axis), and whether your categories appear lined up with or between the tick marks.
Some of the Axis Options are more applicable to other types of charts. I’ll show you those options when we’re discussing those charts. Finally, you can choose how you want to align the text on the axis. In this example, we have plenty of room for Dr. A, Dr. B, etc on our horizontal axis. If we had collections by week for the year, we could format the axis to make the text smaller and angled so that we’d have room to show more weeks in the Horizontal Axis.
