Using HIST and BAR to Customize Your Histograms

(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials Blog.)

I recently had a question come in via e-mail where this MATLAB user wanted to be able to change the look of her histogram. The key to this problem was using HIST to generate the binning data and then use the more flexible BAR to make the bar chart look exactly as she wished. If HIST is used without a left hand side argument, then the function will make a plot using some default choices. If you want more control over the graph, you will have to use the flexibility of BAR to do that.