|I've seen many good helpful suggestions to get excel to stop defaulting to 1905 when trying to graph years (yyyy) on an excel sheet. However, I have found that if you simply want to use the year as an axis line in a chart, the quickest bandaid approach is to not even fight the formatting (yyyy).|
Just insert your graph without selecting any information for your date axis. Once the chart is up, just right click on the axis of the graph, choose the "select data" window, and then reassign data to the axis.
If you want your year column or row to be in the Y axis place your year data in the the "Chart data range" and click OK. If you want it in the x axis, choose the "edit" button under the Horizontal category Axis label section and assign it your year information from your spreadsheet there.