Comments on: Chart with a Dual Category Axis

By: frank

frank — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:40:37 +0000

finally solved my problem, searched the net for it (>12 hrs) , was told by friend that Jon Peltier is th best in excel take a look at his site, and finally found how to do this multi level category labels (or dual category axis)
needed that very much….
THANKS!!!

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:36:21 +0000

Tim -

I don’t know of a specific issue caused by a recent update to Excel 2007, but I’ve heard of several inconvenient problems. I have no suggestions. Labels (in fact, charts in general) are not handled well in Excel 2007. I avoid 2007 as much as possible, using 2003 for my own important work and 2010 for most of my outward-facing work.

By: Tim Sorrell

Tim Sorrell — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:24:58 +0000

Jon… Using Excel 2007 and “mysteriously” my horizontal axis labels began wrapping character by character and now come out vertical. If I “stretch” the chart way out to the right, the labels begin to wrap more and more correctly. These charts were all working fine (wrapping correctly) two months ago when I last used them. Now all my charts are behaving in this strange fashion. It’s as if excel thinks there is some sort of “border” around each horizontal axis label, and when the labels get somewhat close to each other, it begins to wrap… and in my case, they wrap character by character. I have produced a .PDF file of the strange output. Could you take a look at the output and tell me if this is known bug that has been recently introduced into excel 2007? If can take a peek, How do I send the .PDF to you. Thanks very much for your help. My email is timsorrell@comcast.net.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:02:35 +0000

Jon,

After more tinkering, I found that Excel wraps the categories if it has fewer than 14 of them in a single chart. If I add a 14th or beyond, the categories stop wrapping. Not sure if this is by design or a bug, but in any case I decided the simplest solution is to create a second chart and divide the categories across the two. This works for my purposes. Still a puzzling case though.

-Tyler

By: Tyler

Tyler — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:02:47 +0000

Hi Jon,

Thanks for this great site, it’s very helpful!

My question is this: I use multi-category charts in Excel 2007 on a regular basis. In many of mine, I have a large number of categories and each has only two sub-categories. In some cases the category names are long and the sub-categories are not, and I run into an issue where the category names do not wrap, resulting in overlapping letters with the next category. What puzzles me is that some of my charts DO wrap properly. I can’t find any setting for this. Do you know how I can cause my category names to wrap?

Thanks in advance,
-Tyler

By: Stuart West

Stuart West — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:50:08 +0000

Thanks! Somehow pressing delete wasn’t helping, but putting a space character in B31 sorted out the problem. That had completely stumped everyone in the office, so thanks again.