How to specify x-labels in excel chart as “2019-01”, “2019-02” ,etc?

Question

I have a series of data in excel as follow:

x: [2019-01, 2019-02, 2019-03, 2019-04]

y: [12, 13, 12.7, 13.4]

I want to plot y vs. x so that x labels on x-axis be displayed as "2019-01", "2019-02", etc. How can do this job in excel?

Answer 1

Just format your source data the way you'd like it to appear on the chart. To make the dates appear this way in the cells, format cells > Number format > Custom > then type yyyy-mm in the Type field and click okay. The date formatting of the chart axis should default to match the source data. Here is a snip. If you don't want to change the source data format, then select the axis and in Chart Options > Axis Options > Number > Change the format there.