Decimal places in axis

I have made a plot for my work and the axis display as

0, 0.1, 0.2, 0., etc

I want to be able to start with 0.0 so the number of decimal places is consistent.

Answer 1

[dpb]

Yeah, isn't that annoyingly ugly and klunky??? I first complained to TMW 20-some yr ago and they've not fixed it yet.

Anyway, to patch it you have to fetch the tick values then format and set the tick labels manually 'cuz there's no 'format' property for the tick labels, either. :(

So, diatribes aside...

tix=get(gca,'xtick')';
set(gca,'xticklabel',num2str(tix,'%.1f'))

If you can keep parens straight you can nest the calls to avoid the temporary.

set(gca,'xticklabel',num2str(get(gca,'xtick')','%.1f'))

[Jonathan]

Thanks for that, I've been trying to find a solution to this for ages.

[Philippe Corner]

Hi dpb, this would show the number of decimals we need but it changes for example from:

6.5 x10^5 to 6.5000 x10^5

How could we change from

6.5 x10^5 to 650000?

Thanks in advance!

[dpb]

You'll note that Answer came from 2013 and with the pace of change in Matlab that's like back before The Renaissance.

Now you use the numeric ruler properties numeric ruler properties. In particular, set

hAx = gca;             % handle to current axes
hAx.YAxis.Exponent=0;  % don't use exponent
hAx.YAxis.Format='%d'; % use integer format, no decimal points

Answer 2

[LaurenN]

Just an update I came across, you can set the format of ticks using 'ytickformat' or 'xtickformat' in newer versions of Matlab (looks to be since R2016b). For instance, to achieve the format requested for the y axis:

ytickformat('%.1f')

Further info from the documentation: Change tick marks and tick labels

[Ameer Hamza]

Great...it works

[Walter Roberson]

For R2014b and later you can

ax = gca;
ax.YRuler.TickLabelFormat = '%.1f';

[dpb]

Now if they would just fix so out-of-box plot axes aren't so ugly...hmmm; have to see if there is a default property; hadn't thought to look after this update.

Answer 3

[Kelly Kearney]

If you're interested in a shortcut, you can try out this function: tick2text. It cuts out the need to manually grab the tick locations, and can add some more powerful customization too.

plot(rand(10));
tick2text('axis', 'y', 'yformat', '%.1f')

[dpb]

That's kewl...are you listening, TMW?