Get rid of trailing zeroes in Excel charts

Last Updated on August 14, 2016 by Dave Farquhar

I was making a chart in an Excel spreadsheet the other week and it insisted on adding trailing zeroes in the charts after the decimal point, even though all of my stats were whole numbers. Here’s the solution I finally found to get rid of trailing zeroes in Excel charts.

Going strictly by the book, here’s the “right” way to fix it. Highlight the cells containing your data. Then right-click the selection, select Format cells, select Number. Under Decimal places, drop it down to zero. In my case, I did that. Excel kept putting two decimal places in the chart anyway. I guess Excel didn’t read the same book as me.

Finally it dawned on me to select Text as the format for the cells. Excel could still do math against the contents and chart it. But by forcing it to handle the cells as text, Excel stopped adding an unwanted decimal point followed by a pair of unwanted zeroes when we built our charts.

It’s a hack, but it worked for me to get rid of trailing zeroes in Excel charts. So if Excel is ignoring your wishes on the numeric format, try formatting your numbers as text and see if that works for you too. I bet it will.

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