I continue my series on dashboard visualization:
This leads me to a little bit of advice for choosing bars versus columns. You will want to choose a bar chart if the following are true:
- Category names are long, where by “long” I mean more than 2-3 characters.
- You have a lot of categories.
- You have relatively few periods—ideally, you’ll only have one period with a bar chart.
By contrast, you would choose a column chart if:
- Viewing across periods is important. For example, I want to see the number of critic reviews fluctuate across the season for each of the TV shows.
- You have many periods with relatively few categories. The more periods and the fewer categories, the more likely you are to want a column chart.
- Category names are short, by which I mean approximately 1-3 characters.
Some people will rotate text 90 degrees to try to turn a bar chart into a column chart. I don’t like that because then people need to rotate the page or crane their necks. In that case, just use the bar chart.
I like Cleveland dot plots, but they’re not implemented at all in Power BI and the two add-ons in the store aren’t that great either. Also, there’s bonus material explaining why The Punisher season 1 was better than Daredevil season 1.