UCB — Fall 2013 / Chart forms / Bar charts

Bar charts

The bar chart is the workhorse of data visualization and often the best way to visualize data. This leads many chart purists and haters to tweet that your visualization "should have been a bar chart." From the Godfather: ”There's a strand of the data viz world that argues that everything could be a bar chart. That's possibly true but also possibly a world without joy.“ -Harvard Business Review

Bar charts are flexible and have many variants.

Bar charts are good for:

Common mistakes with bar charts:

In the wild:

More examples of bar charts

This could be a wiki we update all year, possibly with comments.