Can't help with the dates prior to 1900 other than suggest that you insert
them as text. However as you say you have latest Excel, if you right click
the labels on the axis you have a multitude of options to format it. Check
out both on the left side of the dialog box and the right side. You can even
set the dates between as you want.

Regards,

OssieMac


"Erin" wrote:

I was hoping this would be easier in the latest Excel, but I had the same
problem with the other versions. The date system seems to begin at 1900 and
doesn't recongnize dates prior to that. In my field, I have data that goes
back several decades before 1900.
Also, I would like the date to show up on the x-axis as "Month, Year" and I
would like to have the option of displaying the data in my chart from a
specified minimum and maximum date without having to change the selection of
my source data (I know I can do this if the x-axis is just numbers instead of
dates, but I want to do it for my date plots).

Thanks