Excel – How to make excel label every bar in a bar chart

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.

The answer by @dav was great and led to my own slightly different solution. Although I appreciate that someone's made a plugin to (probably) make this task as easy as possible, I preferred doing this without help of a plugin. I also would prefer (for now) doing this without using a "Table".

The other answer did have the key idea though (and credit where credit's due!), which is to create a seperate series for the labels with #N/A values where appropriate.

Here were my steps to fix this, starting from where the question leaves off:

1. Create a new CommentLabel column with formula =IF(ISBLANK(D2), NA(), C2)
2. Add the new column as data (right click graph => select data => add the range in column E)

3. Right click the series in the graph to change the type to "Spread" on the Secondary axis, see img:

   

   You can barely see it, but there's grey dots there representing the data points.

4. Click the series to select it

5. Right click it and choose Add Data Labels
6. Right click the data labels and choose Format Data Labels
7. It'll show options for formatting the data labels on the right hand side, pick the top option for Values from Cells;
8. A poppup shows to select the range, pick D2 thruogh D8, i.e. the column with comment texts;
9. On the right-hand pane, de-select "Y Value" for the label options;
10. Optionally move labels around.

Congratulations, if you add comments later they will now appear in the graph automatigically! See: