Excel – Drawing a line graph in Excel with a numeric x-axis

There are at least two ways to accomplish this, one is pretty easy, the other is more difficult.

The Easy Way: As Simkill suggested, just create two (or more charts) and align them, creating an ad-hoc panel chart. By creating your base chart and choosing the formating, you can copy/paste that for subsequent panels ensuring that there's a consistent appearance. It would look something like this:

While this method is easier to set-up, it does require ensuring that your subsequent scales for both Axis are adjusted to ensure that your ranges are consistent. In particular, I'd set both Axis Min and Max values, rather then letting Excel do it automatically.

The Hard Way: You can also trick Excel into making you a panel chart with some specific data layout work. Basically, create an "arbitrary" X Axis with however many points you need for each data set, plus some additional blank values between your panels' values. You'll get something like this:

Once you're setup with this method, you don't have the same issues with scaling as above. In addition, you can use a second data series, format it as a column chart, and use that as banding (like the gray bands for each data series), to help better define breaks in the data sets.

You can make the changes you'd like on a Value Axis, but the chart you've created doesn't use that, it uses a Category Axis. So, without changing your chart type, you can't do what you'd like, the version of Office is generally irrelevant for this issue.

You can approximate a Value Axis by using the Category Axis Date Option (as shown in your example), but you'll have to convert your data values to serial date values, then set a Min and Max (this is not a pretty option, but it is possible), and there's still no way to assign a 0 starting point, so the best you could do is still 1, 501, 1001,...

Generally, if you use a Line or Area chart, Excel makes the X Axis a Category Axis. If you create an XY (Scatter) Chart, it creates a Value Axis. John Peltier's Blog has a great discussion of the differences and even a few work-around suggestions for Filling under an XY Chart to mimic an area chart.

You'll probably find that the easiest way to get what your looking for (and keep the same chart appearance), is to do what you were trying to avoid, and include a helper data series for your label, then just include it on each chart. That will give you the most flexibility with the least effort and redundancy.