# How to change label and ticks of a pgfplots colorbar?

I have a 3d plot with colored surface and a colorbar made with pgfplots.

My probably related questions are:

How can I set the label of the colorbar? What are the equivalents of zticks (positions of its ticks), and ztick label style (changing the format of the numbers)?

Thank you very much!

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It's usually a good idea to post a small complete example document. That helps to clarify the question, and it saves others the work of having to come up with a test case. – Jake Sep 18 '12 at 12:23

The colour bar is a full-fledged axis environment, so all the usual options are available (like title). The ticks in this case are y ticks, so you can set the axis label using ylabel and the tick label style using yticklabel style:

\documentclass[border=5mm]{standalone}

\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.6}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
domain=-180:180,
colorbar,
colorbar style={
title=Color key,
ylabel=Z-value,
ytick={-1,-0.75,...,1},
yticklabel style={
text width=2.5em,
align=right,
/pgf/number format/.cd,
fixed,
fixed zerofill
}
}
]

+1, in my case this resulted in an error Dimensions too large. But setting xtick={150,200,250,300} worked. – Sebastian Mar 15 '13 at 13:41