How To Create A Simple Yet Effective Bar Chart
How to answer the question, “What am I looking at here?”
Introduction
As a DataViz trainer, I use many applications and programming frameworks to create charts of different shapes and sizes. These tools are designed to develop an initial chart of a distinct type with a small amount of effort. However, there is less focus on providing a user with an effective chart.
One of the reasons to produce useful charts is that they provide a means to enhance visual storytelling. Graphs that stand-alone and require little to no degree of explanation are essential when describing information related to complex data sets. I am motivated to produce high impact charts after many years of been greeted with the line “What am I looking at here?”.
The good news is, charting applications (like MS Excel) and plotting frameworks such as Plotly and Bokeh, provide a level of customisation that allows visual storytellers to adjust a basic chart (albeit with a small degree of effort) to provide a high impact chart.
The purpose of this article is to describe how to create useful graphs for some of the most common chart types: Bar, Boxplots, Line and Scatter plots. I use Microsoft Excel to explain the step by step process as this is a tool that…
