Question

How can you increase the width of the bars in a bar graph in MATLAB without causing the bars to overlap? The script below increases the bar width but the bars overlap:

graph = [ 1 2 ; 3 4 ; 5 6 ; 7 8 ];
bar(graph,'BarWidth',2);

Answer 1

The only way I know to do this is via multiple calls to bar.

function h=BarSpecial(data, overallWidth )
    colour = {'r','b'};
    [r,c] = size(data);
    h = zeros(c,1);
    width = overallWidth / c;
    offset = [-width/2 width/2];
    for i=1:c
        h(i) = bar(data(:,i),'FaceColor',colour{i},'BarWidth',width);   
        set(h(i),'XData',get(h(i),'XData')+offset(i));
        hold on               
    end    
end

The following will generate a bar chart with the bars occupying 90% of the total space.

BarSpecial(graph,0.9)

The function BarSpecial as written is not general purpose but could be extended to handle a wider range of input data.