Tick labels for ticks bigger than about 10\'000, get formatted to 1x10^4 for example. Whereas the exponential part appears above the corresponding axes. This misbehavior has
One way to get better control over tick labels, and to avoid the exponential formatting, is to use TICK2TEXT from the File Exchange.
Here's an example:
y = cool(7); %# define some data
ah = axes; %# create new axes and remember handle
bar3(ah,y*1E6,'detached'); %# create a 3D bar plot
tick2text(ah, 'ztickoffset' ,-1.15,'zformat', '%5.0f', 'axis','z') %# fix the tick labels