Adjusting spacing in clustered column chart

Hey everybody,

I tried searching and couldn't come up with anything. How do you adjust the spacing between clusters in a clustered column bar graph? I've attached an image of what I want the final graph to look like, and how I've got it so far. The spacing that Excel generates for my graph (on the left) is far too wide and looks a bit weird. The graph on the right was made in Adobe Illustrator, but I'd like to generate it completely from Excel without any touch ups.

Thanks for the help!

Have you tried:
Right click on bars -> select Format Data Series -> Options -> adjust Overlap and Gap Width.

Not positive it will get it perfect, but it may help.

Thanks for the suggestion but unfortunately I had tried that and it didn't work. It just seems so weird that Excel wouldn't include the functionality to adjust the spacing between cluster groups. It seems like such a basic option. Anyway, the search continues.

Rebooting this thread because I have a related question and it doesn't look like this was ever chased down.

I'm trying to figure out how to adjust the spacing or alignment of the category labels on a column chart. I've tried to select the Axis and then choose Format > Selected Axis and then chose font form the submenu. You can change the size of the font, but usually in font menus there is some kind of numerical adjustment that indicates a number of points or percentage of font size that the type be set above or below the baseline.

I can't find anything like this in any of the options. Alternatively, if I could shift the axis one tic to the side the labels would line up better.

Any ideas appreciated (as well as any ideas on the related question of how to adjust the spacing between the column clusters themselves. The Gap Width and Overlap functions mentioned above seem pretty funky and not to the point for that adjustment. I'm not really clear what they are meant to do.

Thanks,

Brian