Let’s pretend you’re graphing age distributions for a given county.
You carefully formatted your histogram: you removed the border, lightened the grid lines, wrote a descriptive title and subtitle, selected customized RGB color codes, and called attention to a section of the graph with the saturated action color…
… but your chart still looks weird because the bars are so far apart. What’s with all that empty white space in between the vertical bars?!
By default, Excel spaces the bars 150% apart from each other. If each bar is 1 centimeter wide, then the space between the bars will be 1.5 centimeters wide.
This huge space looks odd in a regular bar chart and horrible in a histogram. Histograms, in particular, are supposed to be smushed together. Our eyes are supposed to see the distribution as a seamless, unified shape rather than as a bunch of distinct bars.
Let’s reduce that spacing! Here’s how:
Step 1. Right-click on any of the colored bars. In the drop-down menu, select Format Data Series.
2. Reduce the Gap Width.
“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%.
Reduce the Gap Width from 150% to 30-50% for regular bar charts and from 150% to 5-15% for histograms.
Try various spacing options and see which one you (and your boss and viewers) like the best. There’s no absolute right answer on this; it’s aesthetic preferences. Do aim for consistency within the same final product. For instance, you would’nt 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. Choose one width and make sure everyone on your team formats their graphs accordingly.
In this example, I reduced the Gap Width to 10%.
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Liz
Jun 2, 2015 -
Found this blog post in my email today, I am starting to use Excel more for my job and this is exactly what I needed to see. It may sound strange, but I had noticed that the line spacing on charts made it harder to see the relationship between the data, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying to figure out how to fix it. My boss will be surprised the next time we are working with data. Thanks for the timely help!
shivaraj
Jun 7, 2015 -
I would like to create very thin bar graphs with very little gap. But Excel wont allow you to reduce the width of the bars as much as we want. I hope future versions of Excel allow this
Excel Roundup 20150608 « Contextures Blog
Jun 8, 2015 -
[…] K Emery shows how to make columns in a chart closer together. It's a simple step, but can make a big improvement in the chart's […]
Alex Nejako
Dec 23, 2015 -
Thanks so much for writing this article, this can be very difficult and confusing sometimes.
Protocoder
Jan 21, 2016 -
Thank you the blog .. It helps, but I am here to see if I can decrease the width between two columns at the same time the width size is not changed.
Ginny
Jan 27, 2016 -
This is really simple to understand but like ‘Protocoder’ on Jan 21 I’s also like to know if there is a way to adjust the distance between two columns without changing the width of the bar. Ideally, if I have 4 bars in my chart how do I move two on the left together and the two on the right together, leaving a large gap in the middle?
JohnTM
Oct 5, 2016 -
I’m not sure if there’s a setting that can be adjusted for this, but one means of forcing it, is to enter an empty row or column (depending on how your data is arranged) between the sets of data you want to separate, then enter ‘blank space’ using the space bar in the appropriate cell to appear as an axis label. Repeat for as many times as you need to separate eg if comparing monthly sales or income for any two years, put the empty row/column after each month (except December where it’s redundant).