![excel graph axis label rotate excel graph axis label rotate](https://blog.hubspot.com/hs-fs/hubfs/change-chart-type.png)
The easiest way of solving this - and this will be our solution for many of the issues below - is to remove it, and bump the key information up into the chart subtitle, where it will be horizontal, legible and hard to miss. Neither option is intuitive or easy to read. The y-axis title tends to get put in one of two places, floating at the top of the axis or, more frequently, rotated and squashed vertically beside the axis values. Let’s document all the ways that vertical bars mutilate text and see if we can’t pry the story from its cold, dead hands. But the bars are only half the story, and the half that nobody will ever get to if they can’t decipher what any of it means. I agree that those shapes are superb at representing distinct, legible values. But all of this only applies to the bars.
![excel graph axis label rotate excel graph axis label rotate](https://d13ot9o61jdzpp.cloudfront.net/images/11_label_specific_dates_in_chart_axis_plot_area.png)
Yes, I know vertical bars are the most accurate chart, they deliver pattern perception and table look-up, Cleveland and McGill, yada yada yada. But as soon as you trust them with your data, they will sting you again, and drown you both. Of course they will promise to ferry your story to the other side of the river without rotating or hyphenating or abbreviating your labels, or making everything overlap. Like the scorpion in the parable of the scorpion and the frog, it’s in their nature. The first thing to say about vertical bars is how unfailingly they mangle text. I will argue that deleting as many labels as possible is the only way to make a bar chart an effective communication tool. I will look at them in the two main types of bar charts: vertical and horizontal. In this post, I will look at the three types of labels: axis titles, axis labels and data labels. Chart labels aren’t always the best tools for the job. Place these labels ‘inside or just outside’ the bar.īut there are many ways to explain to an audience what your chart contains. Add data labels to your bar whenever your audience ‘needs to know the individual values’, says Dave Paradi. Otherwise your audience ‘doesn’t have a clue’ what they’re looking at. ‘Always label your axes’, says the peerless Nathan Yau on his flowingdata blog. In this blog series, we look at 99 common data viz rules and why it’s usually OK to break them.