How do I create a colorbar for my subplots and associate the colorbar with the figure rather than each individual axes in MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b)?

I am trying to get a colorbar to reside to the right-hand-side of a series of four subplots. If I issue the command COLORBAR it squishes a colorbar to the right-hand-side of the bottom subplot. The desired result is to have the colorbar stretch from the top to the bottom of the page, spanning all four subplots.

Here is my attempt:

subplot(4,1,1);

imagesc(magic(5));

subplot(4,1,2);

imagesc(magic(6));

subplot(4,1,3);

imagesc(magic(7));

subplot(4,1,4);

imagesc(magic(8));

colorbar

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Below is an example that demonstrates how to create a colorbar for your subplots, and associate the colorbar with the figure rather than each individual axes. Note that the position of each of the axes needs to be altered.

ax(1)=subplot(4,1,1);

imagesc(magic(5),[1 64])

ax(2)=subplot(4,1,2);

imagesc(magic(6),[1 64])

ax(3)=subplot(4,1,3);

imagesc(magic(7),[1 64])

ax(4)=subplot(4,1,4);

imagesc(magic(8),[1 64])

h=colorbar;

set(h, 'Position', [.8314 .11 .0581 .8150])

for i=1:4

      pos=get(ax(i), 'Position');

      set(ax(i), 'Position', [pos(1) pos(2) 0.85*pos(3) pos(4)]);

end