Formatting Ticks in MATLAB^®

How to Format Plot's Ticks in MATLAB^® with Plotly.

Plotly is known for its graphing libraries, but it's also a broader ecosystem for building interactive data apps, AI data analysis tools, and deploying and hosting Dash apps. Explore the full set of tools and platforms designed to help turn data into action. Discover Plotly.

Note: We are retiring documentation for R, MATLAB, Julia, and F#. Learn more about this change here.

Display Tick Labels in Dollars

Display x-axis tick labels in dollars with and without decimal values.

Create a bar chart. Display the tick labels along the x-axis in dollars.

x = 0:20:100;
y = [88 67 98 43 45 65];
bar(x,y)
xtickformat('usd')

fig2plotly(gcf);

Query the tick label format. MATLAB® returns the format as a character vector containing the formatting operators.

x = 0:20:100;
y = [88 67 98 43 45 65];
bar(x,y)
xtickformat('usd')

fmt = xtickformat

fmt =

    '$%,.2f'

Display the tick labels with no decimal values by tweaking the numeric format to use a precision value of 0 instead of 2.

x = 0:20:100;
y = [88 67 98 43 45 65];
bar(x,y)
xtickformat('usd')

xtickformat('$%,.0f')

fig2plotly(gcf);

Display Text After Each Tick Label

After creating a line chart, display the tick labels along the x-axis with the text "GHz" after each value.

x = 1:10;
y = [.17 .25 .27 .28 .3 .32 .33 .34 .345 .35];
plot(x,y,'-V')
xtickformat('%g GHz')

fig2plotly(gcf);

Control Number of Decimals Displayed

After creating a scatter plot, display the x-axis tick labels with two decimal places. Control the decimal places by passing xtickformat a character vector of a numeric format that uses fixed-point notation for the conversion character and a precision value of 2.

x = linspace(0,1,100);
y = randn(1,100).*cos(x);
scatter(x,y)
xtickformat('%.2f')

fig2plotly(gcf);

Format for Date Tick Labels

Create a line plot with datetime values along the x-axis. Then, change the format of the dates.

t = datetime(2014,6,28) + caldays(1:10);
y = rand(1,10);
plot(t,y);
xtickformat('MM-dd')

fig2plotly(gcf);

Query Current Tick Label Format

Create a scatter plot and display the x-axis tick labels in Euro. Then, query the tick label format. MATLAB® returns the format as a character vector containing the formatting operators.

x = rand(100,1);
y = rand(100,1);
scatter(x,y)
xtickformat('eur')

fig2plotly(gcf);

x = rand(100,1);
y = rand(100,1);
scatter(x,y)
xtickformat('eur')

xfmt = xtickformat

xfmt =

    '\x20AC%,.2f'

Tick Label Format for Specific Axes

Starting in R2019b, you can display a tiling of plots using the tiledlayout and nexttile functions. Call the tiledlayout function to create a 2-by-1 tiled chart layout. Call the nexttile function to create the axes objects ax1 and ax2. Plot into each of the axes. Specify the tick label format for the x-axis of the lower plot by specifying ax2 as the first input argument to xtickformat. Display the tick labels in U.S. dollars.

tiledlayout(2,1)
ax1 = nexttile;
plot(ax1,rand(6))

ax2 = nexttile;
plot(ax2,rand(6))
xtickformat(ax2,'usd')

fig2plotly(gcf);