From the course: Picking the Right Chart for Your Data

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Trends: Line charts

Trends: Line charts - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Picking the Right Chart for Your Data

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Trends: Line charts

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- [Instructor] If making comparisons is the most common use of data visualization, showing change over time has to be in second place. They're probably both fighting for first place, really. The first thing some people think of when communicating things over time, is a timeline. We've seen these used for hundreds of years to communicate time-dependent information, such as historical events, as in this example from 1769. But communicating quantitative data that changes over time also has a go-to default chart, just like communicating comparisons has bar charts as its default. For trends, the default is definitely the line chart. Like the bar chart, the line chart was invented by William Playfair, and is one of those ubiquitous charts that most people have seen and have a very clear ability to interpret. And you can have competing lines, and it can still make perfectly good sense. In fact, using smart design and…

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