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

New finding, if I change X-axel type from date to text then I get bars right ... but as it is text the order is top-down from table.

So my temporary workaround at the moment is to organize data in the table in chronological order top-down and use X-axis on text mode but that's ... just dumb.

Answer 3

Thanks Riny_van_Eekelen !

I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that haven't had this issue with earlier Excel versions but that's absolutely a valid point that you made!

(I think there was and perhaps still is option to only plot dates having data and in order, automatically.)

I can also change X-axis base from automatic to for example to year but then if there's two log dates on same year, those will not print out correctly.

But nevertheless big thanks! :)