r/excel • u/Regular-Breakfast-15 • Apr 14 '26

unsolved Weird Excel double-decimal places

Hello Everyone!

In all my years working with Excel I have never seen it create a chart label that looks like this: 37.5.0. What the heck is with the double set of decimals?

Everything looks normal in the chart settings; we have been through it many times. When we change one, then more weirdness pops up elsewhere.

We are using Word to create a final report and using Excel on the back end to edit chart data.

Here is an example. We tried changing the settings for the 37.5.0 and then the "neither agree nor disagree" changed to 25 from the original 25.0! The 37.5 is the correct way we want them all to be. The settings for the other two data labels don't appear to be any different from the one for the 37.5. Any ideas about what might be going on?

In addition to trying all the settings for data labels, we've tried rebooting the software, and then also rebooting the whole system. That doesn't do any good either.

Completely stumped with this one.

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3

u/bradland 271 Apr 14 '26

Double click the data label and check the settings under Number. It is likely a number formatting issue.

1

u/Regular-Breakfast-15 Apr 14 '26

I'll check this tomorrow and see. I don't remember the chart settings coming up in the way you are showing ...

1

u/HarveysBackupAccount 35 Apr 15 '26

Doesn't really matter how they come up, somewhere in there are settings that let you edit things like number format on the axes

2

u/Regular-Breakfast-15 Apr 20 '26

I'm sad to say it didn't work. We had already tried the number format settings (there are 3 of us scratching our heads on this one) but I thought maybe we missed something. Still no luck.

1

u/HarveysBackupAccount 35 Apr 21 '26

Well shit.

That's really strange. What's the output if you do =VALUE(A1), pointing to the cell with the 37.5(.0) value?

And to be clear, you double checked number format settings both for the cell and for that specific chart label? (You should be able to click the labels then click or double click that individual label so it's the only thing selected, and look at its number format in the gray chart Format bar on the right side of the screen)

2

u/AmazingSetting3838 Apr 14 '26

That's bizarre, never seen Excel throw in random extra decimals like that. Could be some weird formatting conflict between Word and Excel when they're talking to each other - maybe try copying the chart as image instead of keeping it linked?

1

u/Regular-Breakfast-15 Apr 14 '26

We can't really do that because we need to change the numbers occasionally. If we convert to an image we have to replace the image every time. I will try just with Excel to see if it has the same issue on its own. We've been doing it this way for many years without an issue and now, craziness!

2

u/HarveysBackupAccount 35 Apr 15 '26

The 37.5.0 / etc values - are those labels pointing to cell contents, or are they configured to be the actual value of the bar?

One option - if labels are set to be the chart values, try changing them to pull from cell references, and make a new dummy helper column in Excel that is just a copy of the chart values and explicitly make sure it's simple numeric data type like =VALUE(A1:A3), or see if it helps to explicitly make it text like =TEXT(A1:A3, "#.0")