Control histogram appearance: width of bars

Hi, I'm plotting the following histogram:

h1 = histogram(FIBR);
h1.Normalization = 'probability';
h1.BinWidth = 100;

I want to the bars to be thinner so I've called

h1 = histogram(FIBR,'BarWidth',0.5);

But I get the following error:

Error using histogram>parseinput (line 211)
Expected input to match one of these strings:

'BinEdges', 'BinLimits', 'BinLimitsMode', 'BinMethod', 'BinWidth', 'BusyAction', 'ButtonDownFcn', 'CreateFcn', 'Data', 'DeleteFcn', 'DisplayName', 'DisplayStyle',
'EdgeAlpha', 'EdgeColor', 'FaceAlpha', 'FaceColor', 'HandleVisibility', 'HitTest', 'Interruptible', 'LineStyle', 'LineWidth', 'Normalization', 'NumBins',
'Orientation', 'Parent', 'PickableParts', 'Selected', 'SelectionHighlight', 'Tag', 'UIContextMenu', 'UserData', 'Visible'

The input, 'BarWidth', did not match any of the valid strings.

Error in histogram (line 118)
[opts,args] = parseinput(args,~isempty(cax));

And I'm really confused because I'm following the manual:

MathWorks - Control Histogram Appereance

Answer 1

[michio]

'BarWidth' option only applies to histograms of categorical data. Is your FIBR categorical or numerical?

The following is one of the example from the documentation:

A = [0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 NaN NaN 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1];
C = categorical(A,[1 0 NaN],{'yes','no','undecided'});
h = histogram(C,'BarWidth',0.5);

If FIBR is of some discrete values, you can convert it to categorical then use BarWith property.

[odo22]

Thanks for your reply.

My data is numerical - is there any way I could convert it? Otherwise, I guess I can live with the bars as they are :S

[odo22]

I tried to use

x = categorical(FIBR)

but I get the following error:

Can not create default category names.  Use the CATEGORYNAMES input argument.

[michio]

I see. Making your data into categorical in some way is one idea. Another possible workaround would be to use bar function after counting the number of elements in the bin. Example follows.

nbins = 10;
x = randn(10000,1);
[counts,edges] = histcounts(x,nbins);
center = 0.5*(edges(1:end-1)+edges(2:end));
bar(center, counts, 0.7);

[odo22]

Worked - thanks a lot! :)