Naming Basics Best practice recommendations are to create a chart placing independent variables on the horizontal, x-axis and dependent variables on the vertical, y-axis.

Layout 11: Layout 11 shows the following chart elements: Legend (Right), Horizontal Axis, Vertical Axis, and Major Gridlines. Any Layout Style you have chosen is how the layout is going to be.

How Excel Charts Work A chart has an x-axis range and a y-axis range to show the correlation between two different data sets. The x-axis is the horizontal category line.

If you have uneven distribution of data in your Excel chart, here is a better way to change the automatic axis settings.

Excel usually does a good job second-guessing me when it chooses the scale for an axis on a chart. But sometimes, to better focus some data, I need to adjust that scale, and that’s when I run into ...

Change the Axis Minimum and Maximum Values One of the more recent chart formatting tools I've discovered relates to the charts' axes.

In Microsoft Excel, to draw attention to a specific marker in a line chart, drop in a thin line, think of it as a marker.