The main struggle for the people now a days is to decide what chart or graph to use in the dashboard for the presentation. Choosing the wrong graphs might create confusion and misinterpretation for the audience. To overcome this we need to understand the need for the chart and ask questions to ourselves. Questions are discussed below.
Do you want to compare values?
Some of the most popular charts or graphs to compare values are column charts and bar charts.
Do you want to show the composition of something?
When you want to show the composition that makes up the whole, it is always good to use pie charts, stacked column, and stacked bar charts.
Do you want to understand the distribution of your data?
If you want to see how your data is distributed in a specific range, it is good to use histograms and these are very helpful in identifying the outliers.
Are you interested in analyzing trends in your data set?
If you are interested to identify trends and analyze patterns in a specific time period then choosing line, and dual-axis line are some good options.
Do you want to better understand the relationship between value sets?
Always go with a scatter plot when you want to identify relations between value sets. It shows you how one variable relates to other, any positive effect or negative effect or no effect.
Different types of charts
1.Column chart
This is used to show the comparison among different items.
Best practices for column charts is to use consistent colors, make the labels clearly visible, always start the axis at 0.
2.Bar graph
This is the horizontal representation of the column chart and this is also used to display the negative values of the data in comparison with positive values.
Best practices for column charts is to use consistent colors, make the labels clearly visible, always start the axis at 0.
3.Line graph
The main purpose of this is to reveal trends and track growth. This is useful when you have continuous data values.
Best practices for line graph is to use solid lines to represent the trend and don't fit more than four lines in a single graph.
4.Dual axis chart
This allows us to plot data using two y-axes and one x-axis.One advantage here is that we can use both categorical data and continuous data to identify the trends and patterns.
Best practices for dual axis chart is to use contrast colors, different styles for two sets, and use y-axis on the left side for the primary variable.
5.Stacked bar chart
This is an extension for the standard bar chart where each bar is further divide into sub bars stacked representing different values. The main advantage is that we can look at two or more numerical values across one categorical variable.
Best practices for stacked bar chart is to keep the chart large enough to view different group sizes and using contrasting colors.
6.Pie chart
Pie chart shows composition of different categories representing a part of whole.
Best practices for pie chart are don't illustrate many categories, make sure that the slice add up to 100% and order slices according to their size.
7.Scatter plot chart
This shows the relationship between two different variables and also can reveal the distribution trends in the data. Main purpose of this is to highlight similarities in the dataset where there are many data points and also to find the outliers in the data.
Best practices for scateer plot chart is to include more variables such as different sizes to incorporate more data and start the axes at 0.
