Wrong date on x-axis in line chart

**sorent** · 12-26-2010, 03:56 PM

Hi,

I have a table in excel with two columns, one with dates (2010-01-01 to 2010-12-31) that I put on the x-axis and one column with values that I put on the y-axis. The dates are fomatted as YYYY-MM-DD. (My excel is installed with swedish language so in swedish the format is actually shown as ÅÅÅÅ-MM-DD.)

Whe I create an (embedded) chart (line chart or scatter chart) the dates on the x-axis starts at 1900-01-01 and the x-axis scale in the chart corresponds to one day per line in the table. The actual values of the dates in the table seems to be completely ignored when the chart is generated. If I manually edit the scale of the x-axis the currency values disappears (they fall outside the time scope).

Can anybody help me getting correct dates on the x-axis ?

I use Excel 2002 SP3, running under Windows XP 2002 home edition SP3.

BR /Sören

**MarvinP** · 12-26-2010, 04:06 PM

Hi Soren,

In general your dates are not being looked at as dates. Try some date/time functions on your date values and see what happens. I believe they are being treated as text instead of dates. You may need to format the cells or reformat them to get your X-axis to work.

**sorent** · 12-26-2010, 05:39 PM

Hi Marvin,
Thanks for inspiration, problem is solved. When I played with the date formats changing from YYYY-MM-DD to YYMMDD I discovered that one of the dates did not respond to changing to format YYMMDD. It was the date 2010-09-31 which is a non-existing date !! Obviously it made all the dates being treated as text when generating the chart.
BR /Sören