How to add horizontal error bars in Excel

The tutorial shows how to make and use error bars in Excel. You will learn how to quickly insert standard error bars, create your own ones, and even make error bars of different size that show your own calculated standard deviation for each individual data point.

For most chart types, only vertical error bars are available. Horizontal error bars can be added to bar charts, XY scatter plots, and bubble charts.

For bar charts (please do not confuse with column charts), horizontal error bars are the default and only available type. The screenshot below shows an example of a bar chart with error bars in Excel:
A bar chart with error bars in Excel

In bubble and scatter graphs, error bars are inserted for both x values (horizontal) and y values (vertical).

If you’d like to only insert horizontal error bars, simply remove vertical error bars from your chart. Here’s how:

Add error bars to your chart as usual.
Right-click any vertical error bar and choose Delete from the pop-up menu.
Delete vertical error bars.

This will remove vertical error bars from all data points. 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.
Customize horizontal error bars in Excel chart.

How to make error bars for a specific data series
Sometimes, adding error bars to all data series in a chart could make it look cluttered and messy. For example, in a combo chart, it often makes sense to put error bars to only one series. This can be done with the following steps:

In your chart, select the data series to which you want to add error bars.
Click the Chart Elements button.
Click the arrow next to Error Bars and pick the desired type. Done!
The screenshot below shows how to do errors bars for the data series represented by a line:
Adding error bars for a specific data series

As the result, the standard error bars are inserted only for the Estimated data series that we selected:
Standard error bars are inserted for only one data series.

How to modify error bars in Excel
To change the type or appearance of the existing error bars, perform these steps:

Open the Format Error Bars pane by doing one of the following:
Click the Chart Elements button > Error Bars > More Options…
Right-click error bars and select Format Error Bars from the context menu.
Double-click the error bars in your chart.
To change type, direction and end style of the error bars, switch to the Options tab (the last one).
To change the color, transparency, width, cap, join and arrow type, go to the Fill & Line tab (the first one).
Customizing error bars in Excel

How to delete error bars in Excel
To remove all error bars from your graph, click anywhere within the chart, then click the Chart Elements button and clear the Error Bars check box. The shortest instruction ever 🙂

To delete error bars for a specific data series, click on that data series to select it, then click the Chart Elements button and uncheck the Error Bars box.

If a data series has both vertical and horizontal error bars and you wish to delete the “extras”, right-click the superfluous bars, and choose Delete from the context menu.