When to use a bar chart
Bar charts compare categories: sales by product, votes by option, population by country, bugs by module. If your question is "which one is biggest?", a bar chart answers it at a glance — the length encoding makes precise comparisons easier than any other chart type.
Best practices
- Keep labels short — the chart truncates very long ones, so edit them in the data table.
- 7–12 bars reads best; more than that consider a pie for shares or a line for trends.
- Start the y-axis at zero (this tool always does) — truncated axes exaggerate differences.
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