Comparing data across a number of categories is one of the most common types of data analysis and the best way to achieve this is with a bar chart. Data visualization expert Matt Francis explains the principles behind how a bar chart works, what is needed to make it effective and ways to enhance a basic chart to add more detail while retaining visual clarity
- [Instructor] When it comes to comparing categorical data,…it's really hard to beat the bar chart.…Although it's a very simple chart and often used,…it's one of the best ways of visualizing data.…A bar chart encodes the value in the length of bar…across an axis.…So, for that, we're going to use our Sales.…Here we have an axis and the length of bar…denotes the amount of sales in our data set.…In this example,…it's about 2.3 million dollars.…Next, we want to subdivide this bar…into our separate regions.…
So, we add the Regions to the y axis.…Now, we have a header showing the name of the Region…and four bars.…Each one denotes in the amount of sales for each category.…We can now compare the sales across all of our Regions.…We can easily see that the West…is the biggest selling region.…This is just looking at four of our regions.…What about if we have a larger number?…For example,…let's look at Sub-Category instead of Region.…So, replace that…and now we can see all of the Sub-Categories that we sell.…
We can see which ones were making the largest…
Author
Released
11/24/2016- Visualizing comparisons
- Building bar and line charts
- Creating tree maps for long-tail data
- Optimizing your dashboard layout with small multiples
- Visualizing data distributions
- Visualizing data composition
- Visualizing geographic data
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
Views
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Introduction
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Welcome1m 7s
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Exercise files1m 18s
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1. The Rules of Effective Data Visualization
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Why visualize data?6m 34s
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2. Comparing Data Sets
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Visualize comparisons in data10m 10s
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Bar charts across categories2m 46s
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Line charts over time4m 52s
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3. Data Relationships
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4. Distributions with Your Dataset
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Visualize data distributions5m 39s
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5. Compositions of Data
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Visualize data composition4m 19s
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Stacked bar charts4m 53s
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100% stacked bars5m 9s
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Stacked area chart3m 26s
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100% stacked area chart2m 24s
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6. Geographic Data
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Visualize geographic data9m 16s
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When to map geographic data4m 21s
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Conclusion
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Next steps53s
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Video: Bar charts across categories