Reporting & Dashboarding: When & how to build a Bar chart?
A bar graph (or chart & bar diagram) is a two-axis chart used to compare categories of data together. One axis represents numerical values and the other one represents categories we want to compare. This is one of the easiest visual representation to interpret. The taller is the bar, the larger is the category.
Depending on what you want to show, two types of bar chart can be built, horizontal or vertical.
A vertical bar chart is relevant when some of your categories (x axis) have negative values
A horizontal bar chart is relevant especially when you have a large number of categories to display or when categories’ names are too long.
A bar chart is especially relevant to:
· Easily compare sets of data between different categories at first sight.
· Show a relationship between the categorical and a numerical data.
· Show the evolution of a single data over time
For our examples, we will be using this Financial Excel data file, that you can download here: http://bit.ly/2umJQDS.
And we use JetPack Data to analyze and build all our charts. You can register here for a free account.
In this example, we want to compare sales for 5 different segments and the bar chart representation help us identify the best seller segments at first sight. Furthermore, we can assess the amount of sales of each segment very quickly thanks to the y axis.
Bar charts enable you to to further. It is easy to segment each of your categories (bars) into smaller ones.
Example: Now we choose to observe sales by products and we want to add segmentation by country. This is very useful to dig down into a categorical data, using other data as segmentation criterion. This gives us a clustered bar chart.
This Bar charts can be built with Excel Pivot table functions, but it may take a while…. Or you can save time, and build your own charts instantaneously from your data, using JetPack Data, the fastest visualization tool. The quick demo below shows how JetPack Data can be used to build bar chart and clustered bar chart.
