Plotting a bar graph with a large x-axis

I'm trying to plot a bar graph with a very large x-axis. When I do this, it makes my data at the end close to zero look very skinny. Below is what I want it to look like (graph taken from TestLab) and what Im getting in matlab. Is there a way to shrink the x-axis to only the values I need?

Thank you in advance.

[Rik]

Either you need to label every bar in your plot, or you need to make clear which parts of the axis are skipped. Which do you want?

[Brenden Sluyter]

How would it work if I were to skip parts of the axis?

[Rik]

You would need to make that yourself because it is probably not something you should be doing. You can either use multiple axes objects or adjust the x values and set the xlabels (so instead of plotting 1 2 10 11 you plot 1 2 3 4 and set the labels to 1 2 10 11).

[Mohammad Sami]

If your bar charts are at discrete values, one way is to convert your x-axis into a categorical variable. Then plot against the categorical variable.

Answer 1

[Ajay Pattassery]

Here assume you are plotting the bar plot with x and y as defined below.

x = [1 100 100000];
y = [1 2 4];
bar(x,y)

You will get an output similar to the one you have got above due to the huge scale of the x-axis.

For that, define x as just integers from 1 to number of elements in your x values. Then using xticklabels, define the tick labels.

xModified = 1:length(x)
bar(xModified,y)
xticklabels(gca,{'1','100','100000'});

Alternatively, You can use a logarithemic scale on the x axis and then use xticks and xlabels to label the x axis. This makes bar to be placed at the relative location with respect to the x value.

y = [1 2 4];
x = [1 100 100000];
bar(log(x),y);
xticks(log(x))
xticklabels([{'1'},{'100'},{'1000000'}])