Adding Custom Error Bars to Column Graphs in Google Sheets

This video will show you how your can add custom error bars, such as standard deviation and SEM, to your Google Sheets column graphs. For help on what standard deviation and SEM are and how to interpret them as error bars, check out this video:

[barsdice]

Perhaps the most common thing to add to a graph of how can sheets just _not_ have this as a feature. Thank you for the video

[dannyvanny]

Finally someone knows how. Whenever I look it up it just tells me how to add error bars to each graph of the series.

[loiubh]

What about if I have a graph with different trials and want to add a different error bar to each bar on the graph?

[markschira]

Thanks for the video, it's well made and helpful.
Of course the real solution would be for Google to add support for "custom" where one could provide the error bar values from the sheet. It does not seem like much to ask for.

[mashedmatatoes]

Jesus this is a life saver, big thanks for the tutorial!

[bianco]

Thank you so much. Hours of frustration until I found this.

[mknbh]

Thank you, spent a long time look for how to do this

[mydearriley]

Is this possible to do if there are two data points per value on the x-axis (arranged in two "series")?


I've tried this method and the result is that all data points cluster on the first x-value and the other x-axis values are left empty (should have two bars per x-axis value). Unfortunately/optimistically, this is the only way I've found to gain access to the option to customize error bars for each bar in the two "series."

[EjiaLu]

Thanks for the video. Life saver for Mac users

[ZoeAngel-lh]

Wow thanks so much!! Saved me so much time

[lillyzarra]

This was a very helpful and straightforward video. Thank you so much!

[unluckypuppy]

Thank you so much for making this video. It's super helpful!!

[dagmarbirkfeld]

Thanks, Kevin! Good to see your face pop up.

[MaxBoomingHere]

Thank you! This helped a lot. Although Google Sheets has gotten better since the making of this video, the standard deviation error bar they have isn't correct lol. For some reason using constant actually makes it work correctly

[Mentalcheez]

Great workaround, thanks! I thought you should know that the yellow error bar was incorrect (it was set to "Percent" instead of "Constant"). Cheers.

[dancer]

What about when you have a stacked bar chart? Inverting when you already have two series makes it turn out really weird and it doesn't work. How would you add the standard deviation in this instance?

[chloewang]

This is so helpful! Thank you very much!

[Angjolly]

Thank you so much!! This is 100% what I needed!

[willg]

Office 365 doesn't have a custom error bars feature either. So I switched to Sheets expecting to find it there... nope. Why isn't there a standard "I want custom bars!" button, there used to be. Thanks for the video.

[nevanoconnell]

You know its bad when the word magically is thrown around by a scientist.