In this example, I reduced the Gap Width to 10%. Choose one width and make sure everyone on your team formats their graphs accordingly. For instance, you wouldn’t have a Gap Width of 5% for the histogram on the first page of your report and a Gap Width of 15% for the histogram on the second page of your report. There’s no absolute right answer on this it’s aesthetic preferences.ĭo aim for consistency within the same final product. Try various spacing options and see which one you (and your boss and viewers) like the best. Reduce the Gap Width from 150% to 30 to 50% for regular bar charts and from 150% to 5 to 15% for histograms. Gap Width is a jargony name that simply refers to the size of the spacing or gap in between the columns. Excel’s default setting is typically around 150%.
In the drop-down menu, select Format Data Series. Step 1. Right-click on any of the colored bars. Let’s reduce that spacing! There are only two steps. Our eyes are supposed to see the distribution as a seamless, unified shape rather than as a bunch of distinct bars. Histograms, in particular, are supposed to be smushed together. This huge space looks odd in a regular bar chart and horrible in a histogram. If each bar is 1 centimeter wide, then the space between the bars will be 1.5 centimeters wide.
What’s with all that empty white space in between the vertical bars?!īy default, Microsoft Excel spaces the bars 150% apart from each other. … but your chart still looks weird because the bars are so far apart.
You carefully formatted your histogram: you removed the border, lightened the grid lines, wrote a descriptive title and subtitle, selected custom RGB color codes, and called attention to a section of the graph with the saturated action color…
Let’s pretend you’re graphing age distributions for a given county. Wondering how to widen the bars in your bar or column chart? Or how to move the bars or columns closer together? This tutorial is for you!
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