An Arrhenius plot show the logarithm of a property that is thermally acitavted versus the reciprocal temperature aka 1/T. Now is 1/T something that most people are not used to. This is why most of the plot also contain the translation in temperature on a second axis. Usually on top of the graph. The output should look like this:

Picture Source

The second axis is only for better readability and is corresponds to the primary axis with the relation:

primary=1/secondary 



secondary=1/primary

What I am not able to do in excel 2010 is the reciprocal second x-axis. Is there a way to do this?

A secondary problem is that I am not able to insert a secondary axis in a XYScatterplot

Problem 1: How to format an axis reciprocal (1/x)?

Problem 1b: How to properly add a second x axis in a XYscatterplot?

Note: If you know a solution to this using Macros (VBA) then my related question on StackOverflow is here

This link excplains how it is done. This would also work for other scaling axis like square root ect. Here a small outline of how you do it:

Create your ticks as a series:

• calculate all axis ticks you want the x's of a series


• all y's of the series need to be exactly the lowerlimit of your y axis (or the upper limit if you want your axis to be on top)

Add Datalabeling

• The markers of your series will now your ticks, after adding datalabeling, every tick can be labeled with the respective, in this case, temperature


• The line and marker are formatted to "none" like this only the label is visible

Gridlines can be added using errorbars

• add errorbars to the series


• format the errorbars to have no ending


• set the length of the errorbar to be the height of the plot

This game can be repeated for the y-axis if you want to.