Question

I need to round off the X-ticklabels in an excel chart to the nearest 50. The charts are created in VBA, the data series is in a worksheet so I would be happy to use a solution in either. I have written the following function that rounds to the nearest 50:

  Function RoundTo50(number As Double) As Double
      RoundTo50 = WorksheetFunction.Round(number * 2, -2) / 2
  End Function

I have applied it to the min and max x limits of the chart and it works for them, but I can’t work out how to apply this to all the ticklabels in between. I thought of applying it to all the data before plotting but that would alter the plot which I don’t want to do. I would prefer for the ticklabels to be slightly misaligned due the rounding.

Can you do this with a formatting string? Or any other way?

Thanks

Answer 1

So the answer is as follows (thanks to Sam Ward for the comment that pushed me in the right direction):

Use my RoundTo50() function to round of the min and max limits to the nearest 50. Calculate what the interval should be for a reasonable amount of grid lines, in my case 12. Round this interval to the nearest 50.

Function RoundTo50(number As Double) As Double
    RoundTo50 = WorksheetFunction.Round(number * 2, -2) / 2
End Function

and

With Sheets("Report").ChartObjects.Add(...)
    .Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MinimumScale = RoundTo50(Sheets(sheetName).Range("M4"))
    .Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MaximumScale = RoundTo50(Sheets(sheetName).Range("M124"))
    .Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MajorUnit = RoundTo50((.Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MaximumScale - .Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MinimumScale) / 12)
    .Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MinorUnit = .Chart.Axes(xlCategory).MajorUnit / 3

I would still be very much interested in being able to do this with a formatting string though as I have a secondary axis in percent and the grid lines from rounding to 50 are slightly offset with the tick marks of the secondary axis. With a formatting string they would be perfectly aligned (because they would be slightly in the wrong place but I would prefer that).