From the course: Picking the Right Chart for Your Data

Chart categories - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Picking the Right Chart for Your Data

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Chart categories

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- [Instructor] So now you have your QuAIs. What's next? How can you translate this information into sensible chart selections? There are dozens of named charts for displaying various kinds of data. When you think about charts with this very broad lens, you can organize them into a short list of primary categories. Comparisons, when you want to compare the full values or at least the rankings of various things. Trends, when you want to show how some values are changing over time. Proportions, when you want to show the relative market share or part to whole values of something. Relationships, when you want to express the correlation or connections between various values. Distribution, when you want to show how often or under what circumstances certain values appear in a usually larger data set. Deviation, when the focus is on the variation of the data from some starting point such as zero. And geographic, when the data has a spatial or geographic component that's central to the QuAI. While this is not an exhaustive list of categories, it's a good start for thinking about your data and the best charts to display them. It's important to note that these categories are broad, and there is crossover between them. For instance, there are charts that allow you to make comparisons and show proportions at the same time. Charts that allow you to show trends and relationships simultaneously, or show distributions and deviations, and certainly those that show geographic information and comparisons. I'm not the first person to do this categorization by the way. It's important to point to others whose work precedes mine, including those at the links on the screen. In fact, these are all good shorthand documents that you can refer to when you're picking charts for your data. They vary between each other and each includes some chart types that I would generally recommend you avoid. But they're all good cheat sheets at minimum.

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