Date Axis in Bars command

[thomas whiteParticipant]

When I plot data using the Plot command I get a nicely formatted horizontal date axis. It does a good job of automatically adjusting the tick marks for the space available and shows week or month incrementally.

When I want to get that same type of axis in the Bars command. When I specify a column of date data the command tries to write out each date making an unreadable axis.

[dgteamModerator]

We made up a data set with a similar issue, where you have many rows of data.

Here it is using the Bars command.

You could rotate the x labels in the Axis settings. But at some point you would have too many. The important thing to realize is that all the Bars command does is place a label at each group of bars.  This is treated as a categorical axis, not a numerical axis, which is why every label is drawn.

If you set the Labels to “Nothing”, you can see that the Bars are actually drawn at the row numbers on the x-axis.  Now the axis is numerical so it will adjust.

The fact that you have just a few bars over a long span, I recommend using a Bar command instead. Find under the command menu (Command > Add Bar).  In this command, you can specify the numerical location of the bars.  You can offset them left and right to get the side-by-side look, or overlay as shown here.

There is a comparison of the commands in the How to make a bar graph article that explains further.  The article also compares the Pivot command, which can also plot bars on a numerical axis when you have your data in a flattened format.

Hope this helps!

[thomas whiteParticipant]

Wow! Thanks for the helpful and detailed response. I made the changes you suggested to my plot and it looks much better now.

I’m using DataGraph to plot manual measurements of Snow Water Equivalent from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. The field dig several times a winter at subalpine and alpine study plots. This plot now communicates the different water contents very easy to understand fashion.

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