Microsoft's Excel offer you a variety of pre-formatted charts and graphs that you may add to your spreadsheet documents. As with other aspects of Excel, such as text, images and objects, you have a level of control over the appearance of your chart. When you insert your chart, Excel automatically sets the space between the data series, but you use the gap width control to move the bars closer together.
Step 1
Launch Excel and open the spreadsheet that contains the chart bars you want to move closer together. Right-click once on a data series and select the "Format Data Series" option, which will open a separate dialogue window.
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Step 2
Click the "Series Options" tab on the Format Data Series window. Click the up and down arrows in the "Overlap" field to move the data series within each category on the y-axis closer to one another. The higher the number listed in the field, the closer together the bars move to one another. Note that the individual bars will overlap one another at some point. Check the preview window to get an idea of how close the bars are together.
Step 3
Click the up and down arrows in the "Gap width" field to move the different data series on the y-axis closer to one another. The lower the number listed in the field, the closer together the bars move to one another. Note that the lowest number you may enter is zero, at which point, all of individual bars will touch. Check the preview window to get an idea of how close the bars are together.
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