Formatting Tick Labels

After having changed the size of the axis titles, we also want to change the tick label size. This is done within the "Ticks Labels" dialog (see Figure 3-17).

By means of the "Style" dropdown list, you can choose whether your tick labels have numeric values according to the axis scaling or text labels contained in some column of a worksheet. From the "Format" dropdown list, you can select the format of the numbers (decimal, scientific, ...). The "Precision" spinbutton lets you set the number of digits following the decimal point. In the case of "MyFirstPlot", it makes no sense to have digits after the point, so we set "Precision" to zero.

The "Prefix" and "Suffix" textboxes let you define leading and trailing symbols for your tick labels. For example, If you define the greek letter pi as a suffix for the x axis, you will get 0pi, 2pi, 4pi, ... as tick labels.

We leave this blank, but we choose Helvetica 16 point as the font size for the tick labels.

Using the "Offset" spinbutton within the "Position" frame, it is possible to change the distance by which the tick labels are offset from the respective axis. Also, we can rotate the labels by some angle other than zero degree by choosing an appropriate value from the "Rotate" spinbutton.

To finish label formatting, we click the "Bottom" tab of the dialog to set the font size to 16 point and the precision for the bottom x axis to zero. Then click the "Apply" button. The result is shown in Figure 3-18.