What is a bar chart?
Bar charts are one of the most widely recognized and used visualizations ever. They represent the values of a categorical variable* (dimension) through rectangles, whose length is proportional to the value attributed to it (metric). In other words, in bar charts, data is encoded by length.
They are an efficient way of comparing bar lengths making this graph easy to interpret.
When labels on the X-axis are too long, the horizontal bar’s version is a great option. Bar charts are more comfortable to read long names since their structure is closer to the western way of reading texts (from left to right). Moreover, they lend themselves to graphic improvements.
In the following example, we have hidden the axes to make the chart clearer and more readable.
*A categorical variable is composed of a finite number of non-implicitly sortable values. Some examples of categorical values are literary genres, names of people or things, species of animals, etc.
How to create a bar chart on BStreams
- Open the Project editor
- Drag Columns or Bars object and drop it on the canvas
- Select the sample dataset “Top 10 richest men in the world 2022”
- Choose Full Name under Select dimensions
- Choose Net Worth under Select metric
- Click Apply
Common mistakes
1. Bars are often confused with histograms: even though they visually look identical because they both display rectangles, histograms represent the distribution in classes (called bins) of a continuous numeric dimension. What differentiates them is the initial dataset and the phenomenon to show.
For example, if we would like to split the Los Angeles Lakers NBA player’s height per example class, the length of each rectangle would display the frequency of cases that fall within each class.
2. Bars are often wrongly used in place of line charts: If we needed to compare the sales over the years, it is better to use a line chart. In this case:
- the dimension variable is not categorical
- even if we wanted to compare sales; probably, it is preferable to show the trend over the years with a line rather than rectangles.
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