The question from ExcitingMortgage9166 deserves a straightforward answer: set your APA bar charts to a width of 4.5 inches, skip the outline, and stop second-guessing yourself. This is one of those small formatting decisions that can quietly derail a whole afternoon, and it should not. The APA manual itself is deliberately flexible on chart dimensions, but the practical constraint here is your one-inch side margins on a standard 8.5-by-11-inch page. That leaves you a 6.5-inch usable width. A 4.5-inch chart gives you room for a clean caption below and keeps the visual weight centered without crowding the text. Eleven identical charts will look deliberate and controlled, exactly what academic readers expect.
On the outline question, your instinct is correct. Charts without outlines look more professional, not less. APA guidelines do not mandate outlines, and in practice, a borderless chart reads as modern and uncluttered. The outline is a relic from early graphing software that needed boundaries to separate the chart from the page. That need is gone. What matters now is the data itself, the bars, the labels, the axes. An outline adds visual noise without adding meaning. If you want a clean look, leave it off. If you want to be safe, check your department's style guide or ask your advisor, but the trend in APA publications is toward minimal framing.
The deeper issue here is worth naming. This user is doing the right thing by asking, but the fact that a researcher has to pause and seek advice on chart dimensions and outlines reveals how much friction still lives in the tools we use. Spreadsheets and graphing software were not built with APA formatting in mind. They were built for business dashboards, not academic rigor. So every user ends up fighting the defaults, resizing, removing outlines, aligning captions manually, repeating the same fix eleven times. That is not a skill gap. That is a design gap. The tools should adapt to the user's workflow, not the other way around.
A future-focused approach to data management would let you define your chart format once, apply it across all visuals, and trust that the software respects APA structure from the start. That is not a distant possibility. It is what AI-native spreadsheet tools are beginning to deliver, intelligent defaults that reduce formatting decisions to zero so you can focus on analysis and writing. For now, take the practical advice: 4.5 inches wide, no outline, same size for all eleven charts. Then ask yourself why you had to figure that out alone, and expect more from the tools you use tomorrow.