How to remove relative shift in matplotlib axis

Question

When I try to do a plot against a range with big enough numbers I get an axis with relative shift for all the ticks. For example:

plot([1000, 1001, 1002], [1         


        

Answer 1

To disable relative shift everywhere, set the rc parameter:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.rc('axes.formatter', useoffset=False)

Answer 2

plot([1000, 1001, 1002], [1, 2, 3])
gca().get_xaxis().get_major_formatter().set_useOffset(False)
draw()

This grabs the current axes, gets the x-axis axis object and then the major formatter object and sets useOffset to false (doc).

In newer versions (1.4+) of matplotlib the default behavior can be changed via the axes.formatter.useoffset rcparam.