Excel Bubble Chart How To Quickly Insert

You will learn how to quickly insert standard error bars, create your own ones, and even display individual error bars for each data point.

In science, uncertainty is the beginning of an investigation.

And because scientists love quantifying things, they found a way to quantify uncertainty.

For this, they calculate confidence intervals, or margins of error, and display them by using what is known as error bars.

In other words, error bars can show you how far from the reported values the actual values might be.

In scatter plots and bubble charts, both vertical and horizontal error bars can be displayed.

You can also set your own error amount and even supply an individual value for each error bar.

By default, the bars are graphed with 1 standard deviation for all data points.

This will open the Format Error Bars pane, where and you change error bars type, choose another color and do other customizations.

To add error bars in Excel 2010 and 2007, this is what you need to do.

But if you wish to display your own error bars, you can easily do that too.

You can now enter your own values in the boxes (without equality sign or curly braces; Excel will add them automatically) and click OK.

If you do that, Excel will think you simply forgot to input a number and it will retain the previous values in both boxes.

You have calculated an average (B6:D6) for each column and plotted those averages in a chart.

Additionally, you found the standard deviation for each column (B7:D7) by using the STDEV.P function, and now you want to display those numbers in your graph as standard deviation error bars.

Otherwise, the range will be added to the existing array like shown below, and you will end up with an error message.

Horizontal error bars can be added to bar charts, XY scatter plots, and bubble charts.

The screenshot below shows an example of a bar chart with error bars in Excel.

You can now open the Format Error Bars pane (for this, double-click on any of the remaining error bars) and customize the horizontal error bars to your liking.

For example, in a combo chart, it often makes sense to put error bars to only one series.

I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next week.

Excel For Mac Bubble Chart