Thanks for your response...The N/A was avoiding the year from being displayed but if I have multiple bars (2 data items) for the same year and only one had data, then both labels were displaying and the N/A data label was coming up zero...I may have done something else wrong in generating the N/A though... anyway, wound up writing a worksheet change macro to delete data labels where values were zero or N/A...tomorrow I'll try your suggestion and see if I wasted time with the macro... Thanks again.