Column chart - one error bar is too large for the chart

**EON87** · 01-30-2019, 03:03 PM

Hi

I have a standard column chart with error bars displaying 95% confidence intervals. All of the values and confidence intervals are in a range 0-12, except for one which goes up to 50. If I make the x-axis large enough to include this interval, all the other columns get really small. I therefore would like to let the x-axis have a max value of 50, but let it go up to 12 with units of 2 and make the length between 12 and 50 very small. Is there any way of doing this?

Thanks in advance!

**dflak** · 01-30-2019, 04:38 PM

See if this helps: https://peltiertech.com/broken-y-axis-in-excel-chart/.

**EON87** · 01-30-2019, 06:42 PM

Hi, thanks for answering. Unfortunately it didnt really solve it for me, as a panel-chart as the article recommends will be very unnecessary when the only element that would show up in the upper panel will be the one
error bar. All the columns and the other error bars are below 12.

**dflak** · 01-31-2019, 12:40 PM

I was hoping that the author would show how to break the axis, but apparently he removed that solution.

**MrShorty** · 01-31-2019, 01:44 PM

Andy Pope still has a broken axis example/tutorial: http://andypope.info/charts/brokencolumn.htm I also think one could use Peltier's "arbitrary axis" technique (similar to what he does here for the "reciprocal axis": https://peltiertech.com/reciprocal-chart-axis-scale/ ) to acheive a similar look.

I might still agree with Peltier, though. This will obscure the visualization of the data where a reader could easily see that the error on the first column is not as large as it really is. I might still be inclined towards the panel chart type approach he recommends where you have one panel/chart to show how large the error on the one bar is, then a second panel/chart to focus on the other bars.