To create an error bar chart, from the menus choose: Graphs > Chart Builder… Select the Gallery tab, and select Bar from the list of chart types. Drag and drop the Simple Error Bar icon onto the canvas area.

Error Bars can be applied to graphs such as Scatterplots, Dot Plots, Bar Charts or Line Graphs, to provide an additional layer of detail on the presented data. Error Bars help to indicate estimated error or uncertainty to give a general sense of how precise a measurement is.

An error bar chart

1. To create an error bar chart, from the menus choose:
2. Select the Gallery tab, and select Bar from the list of chart types.
3. Drag and drop the Simple Error Bar icon onto the canvas area.
4. Drag and drop Score on training exam onto the y axis.

The “Chart Layout” menu should appear. Click on “Error Bars” and the “Error Bars Options” as shown below. The “Format Error Bars” box should now appear, as shown below left. Choose whether you want your error bars to go up, down, or both, by checking the appropriate buttons.

In the chart, select the data series that you want to add error bars to. On the Chart Design tab, click Add Chart Element, and then click More Error Bars Options. In the Format Error Bars pane, on the Error Bar Options tab, under Error Amount, click Custom, and then click Specify Value.

Add or remove error bars

1. Click anywhere in the chart.
2. Click the Chart Elements button. next to the chart, and then check the Error Bars box.
3. To change the error amount shown, click the arrow next to Error Bars, and then pick an option.

You can add an error bar on your barplot with the geom_errorbargeom. You need to supply the yminand ymax, so you need to compute it manually. From the geom_errorbarhelp page:

To make graphs with ggplot2, the data must be in a data frame, and in “long” (as opposed to wide) format. If your data needs to be restructured, see this page for more information. The examples below will the ToothGrowth dataset.

This video demonstrates how to create and interpret error bar graphs using SPSS. Error bars are often used to indicate the 95% confidence interval, but can also express other statistics of interest (e.g. the standard deviation or standard error of the mean).

A finished graph with error bars representing the standard error of the mean might look like this. The points are drawn last so that the white fill goes on top of the lines and error bars. The procedure is similar for bar graphs.