It would be helpful if you could specify a custom formatting function for the ticks, which gets the value of the tick and returns a string. So you can format the ticks more easily yourself. For example date and time for a scatter plot. Or is there already a possibility to display date & time in a scatter plot? Otherwise you could simply use the DateTime.ticks as X values and then use a formatting function to create a DateTime object and then a formatted string from the ticks.