A quick experiment confirmed your problem. Would a Line chart work for you?
The problem goes away and Line charts are appropriate for time series
charts.
best wishes
--
Bernard V Liengme
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme
remove caps from email

"JRS" wrote in message
...
I work for an environmental engineering firm, and commonly create
time-series
and other scatterplots of numerical data using Excel.

In Excel 2003, I could format a time-series scatterplot axis minimum and
maximum easily by typing in the dates in short date format. Not so in
2007 -
it refuses to accept dates in anything but "days elapsed since 01/01/1900"
format.

Is there a workaround for this? Why was it changed? It was quite useful.

Overall, I'm pretty unhappy with the new Excel. It seems to have acquired
a
lot more layers of very questionable usefulness. Many of the new features
in
the graphing (charting) function would be a lot more at home in Powerpoint
than in a bread-and-butter engineering program like Excel. Most of the
changes seem to be of the "because we can" variety rather than having been
driven by any real need or user feedback.

Thanks,

JRS