How to Widen Bars in Excel Chart

Ever create a bar chart in Excel only to have it filled with tall, skinny bars that look lost at sea? It’s a common frustration that can make your data look less impressive and harder to read. Thankfully, fixing it is a quick, 30-second adjustment. This tutorial will walk you through the easiest way to widen bars in any Excel chart, giving you more control over the look and feel of your reports.

Why Widen Your Excel Chart Bars in the First Place?

Before jumping into the "how," let's briefly touch on the "why." The default chart settings in Excel often leave too much empty space, resulting in bars that look weak and disproportionate. From a data visualization standpoint, this isn't ideal for a few reasons:

• Readability: Exceptionally thin bars can be hard to see and compare, especially when presenting the chart on a shared screen or projector. Wider bars make each category more distinct and easier to interpret at a glance.
• Visual Impact: Wider bars have more visual weight. They make your data look more substantial and professional, helping to emphasize the values they represent. A chart with well-proportioned bars simply looks better and commands more attention.
• Better Use of Space: When you have fewer data points, skinny bars lead to a lot of awkward, empty white space. Widening the bars helps fill the chart area, creating a more balanced and aesthetically pleasing design.

Think of it like choosing the right font size for a document. The content is the same, but the formatting makes all the difference in how easily and effectively your audience receives the information.

The Easiest Method: Adjusting the Gap Width

The single most effective way to change the width of your bars is by adjusting a setting called "Gap Width." This setting controls the amount of empty space in your chart. This article will show you exactly how to find and adjust it perfectly.

Let’s start with a sample dataset. Here we have simple monthly sales figures for a fictional company.

Once you highlight the data and insert a standard column chart (Insert > Recommended Charts > Clustered Column), Excel will likely give you something that looks like this - with lots of blank space between the bars.

Step-by-Step Instructions to Adjust Gap Width:

Here’s how to fix it by shrinking the gap, which in turn widens the bars.

1. Right-Click on a Data Series

Click on any one of the blue bars in your chart. This will select all the bars in that data series (you’ll see small circles appear at the corners of all the bars). Then, right-click to bring up the context menu.

2. Select ‘Format Data Series’

From the dropdown menu that appears, choose "Format Data Series..." at the bottom. This action will open a formatting pane, typically on the right side of your Excel window.

3. Find the ‘Gap Width’ Slider

In the "Format Data Series" pane, make sure you are in the Series Options tab (the icon looks like a small bar chart). Here, you will see a section called "Series Options" with sliders for "Series Overlap" and "Gap Width." We’re focusing on "Gap Width."

By default, Excel often sets this to something high, like 219% or 150%. This percentage represents the width of the gap relative to the width of one bar.

• A higher percentage means a wider gap and narrower bars.
• A lower percentage means a smaller gap and wider bars.

4. Decrease the Gap Width Percentage

To widen your bars, either drag the slider to the left or type a smaller number into the box and press Enter. A good starting point is usually something between 50% and 100%.

For our example, let's change 219% to 75%.

Instantly, your chart will update. The gaps between the bars will shrink, and the bars themselves will become much wider and more substantial.

And that’s it! It’s a simple tweak that makes a huge visual difference, transforming a flimsy-looking chart into a clean, professional one.

A Quick Note on 'Series Overlap'

Right above the "Gap Width" slider is another option: "Series Overlap."

This setting only comes into play when you have more than one data series - for example, a clustered column chart comparing 'Sales' vs. 'Profit' for each month. It controls how much the bars within each category overlap or stand apart.

• A positive percentage (e.g., 20%) makes the bars overlap.
• 0% makes the edges of the bars touch.
• A negative percentage (e.g., -15%) creates a small gap between the bars in the same cluster.

When adjusting Gap Width for clustered charts, you might also want to slightly adjust the Series Overlap to ensure there's clear but not excessive spacing between your series.

An Alternative (But Less Precise) Method: Change the Chart Size

While adjusting Gap Width is the "proper" way to control bar width, you can also influence it by simply resizing the chart area itself. Excel automatically adjusts bar widths based on how much horizontal space is available.

If you click on your chart and drag its right or left border to make the chart wider - without changing its height - the bars will automatically stretch to fill the new space.

This works for a quick adjustment, but it has some downsides:

• It’s not precise. You’re just eyeballing it.
• It changes chart dimensions. It may mess up the layout of your worksheet or dashboard if you have a specific size you need to fit.

For true control over your chart’s appearance, always use the Gap Width setting.

What About Horizontal Bar Charts?

Good news! The process for widening bars on a horizontal bar chart is exactly the same as for a vertical column chart.

1. Click on a horizontal bar to select the data series.
2. Right-click and select "Format Data Series..."
3. In the "Series Options" tab, adjust the "Gap Width" slider to a smaller percentage.

Even though the orientation is different, Excel uses the exact same logic. A smaller gap makes for thicker, more impactful horizontal bars.

Advanced Tip: Use a 'Text Axis' for Time-Series Charts

Are your bars still not wide enough, especially on charts dealing with dates? Sometimes, Excel tries to be too smart for its own good by automatically formatting your horizontal axis as a "Date Axis." This can create invisible gaps if you have an uneven distribution of dates, which in turn keeps your bars thin.

You can force Excel to treat each date as its own distinct category. This forces the bars to use all available space with no gaps.

Here’s how:

1. Right-click on the horizontal axis (where your dates are).
2. Select "Format Axis..."
3. In the "Format Axis" panel under "Axis Options" (the chart icon), under "Axis Type," change the setting from "Automatically select based on data" to "Text Axis."

This trick can be particularly helpful for charts like Gantt charts, where you are plotting activities over time and you need the bars to fill their assigned period fully. It makes a big difference, transforming a bar chart from looking a bit sketchy to looking compact and professional.

Final Thoughts

Adjusting the width of bars in Excel is one of those simple formatting tweaks that makes a massive difference in how professional and effective your data is presented. By using the 'Gap Width' setting in the Format Data Series pane, you gain precise control, enabling you to create cleaner, more readable, and visually impactful charts with minimal effort.

While mastering Excel tweaks like this is a valuable skill, we know that sometimes you want your data to look great without the fuss. That's why we created Graphed. Instead of clicking through multiple menus to adjust gap width, you can simply upload your Excel chart, such as monthly sales figures, and we'll automatically generate a perfectly formatted visual connected to your data sources. It saves all the time you would have spent on resizing and formatting charts, getting you back to analyzing insights instead.