Excel starts its labels with the first value along the axis. My technique
hides the first one and starts with the second. But you want to start the
labels at a different place. Excl won't do it with regular axis labels, but
you can recruit other chart elements to help:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ArbitraryAxis.html

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"IgorM" wrote in message
...
Thank you, but I think I need to explain my problem a little differently.
Given a data set from 1983 to 2000, I would like the x-axis labels to be
1985, 1990, 1995, 2000. I know how to make Excel only show every 5th year,
but I don't know how to make it start with 1985 rather than 1983 without
deleting the 1983 and 1984 data points.

"Jon Peltier" wrote:

Do you want to hide the label but keep the data point? Use a custom
number
format like
[=1983]"";General
for the axis labels.

Do you want to hide the point too? Change the source data range of the
chart
so it starts one row (or column) later.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"IgorM" wrote in message
...
I have a chart with years on the x-axis. The data starts with 1983, but
I
would like the first x-axis label to be 1984 or 1985. How can I do
this,
without simply getting rid of the 1983 data point? Thanks.