Bar Chart Templates

Every chart in this family does the same basic job: turn a category into a bar whose length stands in for a number, so longer means more. What separates the eight templates here is how many numbers each bar is allowed to carry, and how those numbers relate to each other. A plain bar chart gives each category exactly one bar and one value. It's the simplest, most accurately read comparison there is. From there the family branches based on what your data actually needs to show.

Grouped bar and grouped column charts put two or three bars side by side per category, for comparing the same categories across a second dimension: this year against last year, say, or three products across the same set of regions. Stacked bar and stacked column charts instead split one bar into segments, so you can see both a category's total and what it's made of in the same shape. Dumbbell charts drop the bar entirely and use two dots joined by a line, built specifically for showing the size of a change between two points rather than an absolute value. Population pyramid is the specialised case: two horizontal bar charts mirrored back-to-back around a shared axis, the standard shape for age-and-gender demographic data.

Column charts are the vertical sibling of bar charts, same encoding, just rotated ninety degrees, and the choice between the two usually comes down to your labels. Short category names like years or quarters sit fine under a vertical column; long names like company or country names need the horizontal space a bar chart's left-hand axis gives them.