Hi,
I have two problems (bugs perhaps) that I need o find a way to work around
in Excel 2007. They both concern the category (x) axis (text) labels in line
charts. I normally shy away from line charts entirely but, in the given
instance I need to use them.

First question: when you first create the line chart, and when you set the
labels for the category axis, Excel automatically rotates the labels to get
them to fit as well as possible. However, if you go in to the Format Axis
AlignmentCustom Angle box and enter a value, I can find no way of reenabling
Excels automatic selection of rotation. Even deleting the axis, and then
recreating it, does not reactivate this automatic feature. Previous version
of Excel had a radio button for "automatic" but I cannot find this in Excel
2007... Is there any way of reenabling the automatic rotation behaviour?

Second (more serious) question. I am using a line series with text category
axis to plot some time data for different years. As I am only using 3 months
for each year, I do not want to use a time series (most of the graph space is
then occupied by periods with no data). When I select my x axis label range,
everything is OK if this range is fully occupied: by selecting appropriate
entries for Format AxisAxis OptionsInterval between tick marks and
....specify interval unit, I can get appropriately distributed ticks (each
representing, say, 1 week) and adequately spaced labels. However, I wanted
more control over the tick labels so I have created a further range with a
formula which results in a blank unless the original label is for the first
or 15th of a month at (near) midnight. So far so good, but when I make the
line chart refer to this range, which is predominantly blank (""), the chart
now shows only the first label or, by playing with the ...specify interval
unit setting, I can perhaps get it to show the first two tick labels but
under no circumstances all of them (there are about 30 in total, fairly
evenly distributed along the range but corresponding to useful dates). In
previous versions of Excel (I have just tried to make sure that this is the
case), it would work well once this new range is selected and the tick label
spacing set to 1 but not in Excel 2007... I have even tried copying the range
with the formulae to a new range and pasting it as values only (no
difference) and even going in and deleting all the blank cells in the range
between consecutive labels but nothing changes...

Is this behaviour common and is there a work around???

Any help very gratefully received as I have sort of hit a brick wall with
this and, other than going back to Excel 2003m which I would for various
reasons be loathed to do, cannot think of anything else to try...

Many thanks and best wishes, Boris.