Excel chart not plotting bars

Question

Hi, I have bought quite recently Microsoft Office Home and Student 2021 at home which gives me trouble with bar charts.

For some reason my Excel is not plotting bar charts but chart shows up with vertical lines. Same thing if I choose horisontal bar chart, no bars but horisontal lines. I have understanding that there isn't setting for bar width, well at least I couldn't locate such a setting by my 25+ years experience with Excel.

I would have inserted capture picture from the chart but those won't show up here ...

Answer 1

Excel assumes you want to plot the horizontal axis as a date axis. Since you only have 12 data points over an 8-year time span the horizontal axis can hold almost 3000 data points. Then, the columns for each of the twelve plotted becomes very small. See picture.

Change the format of the axis type and set it to "Text axis" and you'll plot 12 same colored columns evenly spread in the chart area.

Edit: I had not seen the example data you provided nor your latest post where you discovered the Text axis option, until after I posted my answer. You can plot the x-axis in reverse order as your data starts with the most recent date at the top.

Answer 2

Hello

I’m Adeyemi and I’d be happy to help you with your question.

I understand your frustration with Excel not plotting bar charts correctly. This issue could be due to a few reasons:

• The data you're trying to plot might be stored as text instead of numbers. Excel will not create a graph from data stored as text. You can fix this by retyping the numbers, clicking on the green prompt to the side of the box, or pasting it to and from another application (Excel should auto-detect it as a number).
• There might be an issue with your Excel application. Ensure you have the latest Office version installed. To install the latest updates, open the Excel app > Go to File > Account > Under Product Information, click on "Update Options" > Select "Update Now". If the problem still persists, you might need to run a "Quick Repair" and see if it fixes the issue.
• There might be an issue with how you're creating the chart. To insert a bar chart in Microsoft Excel, open your Excel workbook and select your data. You can do this manually using your mouse, or you can select a cell in your range and press Ctrl+A to select the data automatically. Once your data is selected, click Insert > Insert Column or Bar Chart.

I hope this helps.

Give back to the community. Help the next person who has this issue by indicating if this reply solved your problem. Click Yes or No below.

Kind regards, Adeyemi

Answer 3

Hi Adeymi,

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, I tried to explain problem is visual, bars appear as thin lines. Length of the thin line is correct and according to data. Latest Office updates are applied to 2021 version.

Now for some reason inserting capture picture of the chart is possible, yesterday it didn't work.

Here's example chart that I made for water consumption:

Answer 4

With this picture, it seems like the bars in your chart are appearing as thin lines. This could be due to a number of reasons. Here are a few potential solutions:

1. Check the Gap Width: In Excel, you can adjust the width of the bars in your chart by modifying the "Gap Width" setting. To do this, right-click on one of the bars in your chart, select "Format Data Series", and then adjust the "Gap Width" slider.
2. Check for Hidden Dates: If you're charting dates, Excel may be inserting dates that you have no data for, therefore shrinking the dates that you do have data for.

Lastly, make sure that your version of Excel is up-to-date. Sometimes, issues like this can be resolved by updating the software.

Adeyemi

Answer 5

Hi,

1. No impact at all no matter how I change bar overlapping or gap width settings between -100% to +100% and mixing negative and positive values.
2. No hidden dates, data is inserted manually to blank excel sheet
3. According to Office when I check updates, I'm having the latest update up and running.

Interesting is that if I plot data as individual values (not series) then I get it bars correctly out. 🙄

But I visually this hard to read, you need to pick color and check what date it is matching and the order is not in chronological order but in the table order top-down ...
LOL, I could change color to be the same for all and then reading the data from graph would be even harder.

Date	Consumption [m3/a]
14.11.2022	150
19.4.2022	167
2.11.2021	174
31.12.2020	173
31.10.2020	236
31.10.2019	225
2.11.2018	227
30.10.2017	196
20.10.2016	215
20.10.2016	216
23.10.2015	198
31.12.2014	194

P.S. For that individual data changing bar overlapping and gap width does work just fine.