How can the answer be improved? What about turning the default gridlines color to white, the same as the workbooks background color? This way the gridlines would not show. This can be done on Excel 2010 by going to File-Options. On the Advanced tab, scroll down until you see on the 'Display options for this worksheet', the option for Gridline color. Just change it to white.
I was designing a chart the other day with data labels indicating values at the end of the year, where the data labels were within the chart area (naturally), but outside the plot area. Since this is the end of the chart, that’s a good clear place for them to be.
But because the end of year is a manager-demanded snarl of numbers, I thought it would help clarify if there was a small horizontal tick mark between the end of each line and its data label. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that horizontal error bars no longer extend even a little bit outside the plot area!
They used to, before Excel 2007, and I used to use them for custom axis tick marks. Thank goodness at least data labels can show outside the plot area. Do you know of a workaround for this, or did I just fail to create an invisible secondary axis into which the error bars could bleed? (I think I tried that and it still didn’t work).
says. Derek – You could try using an en- or em-dash as the first character of the data label. I did discover one time that the end caps of error bars can exist outside the plot area under certain conditions. For example, a data point slightly below the plot area will not be drawn, and its horizontal error bar running along but just outside the bottom edge of the plot area will also not be drawn. But if it’s close enough, the end cap will be drawn, even if it’s slightly outside the plot area.
I tried using this for a project one time, but it was incredibly tedious to set up. Bobb D says.