Stacked Bar Chart
Saeed Kamel
Total Rewards & Benefits Lead at _VOIS(Vodafone Group)| HR Data Analytics Professional |Skilled in Training & Development | Power BI | Spanish Speaker
If your audience is unable to understand the visuals you have created, it indicates that you need to revisit and simplify them to ensure they are more readable and effective.
Today, let's discuss a popular data visualization chart called the Scatter Bar Chart. This chart is commonly used to effectively display comparisons of total values across multiple categories.
Example:
The below Stacked Bar graph is showing a comparison of total sales per month. Additionally, it offers a breakdown of sales categories for each month. In January 2023, the Food Category had the highest percentage of sales, while it was the lowest sales month overall.
When to use Scatter Bar Chart?
If you have to talk about both the overall total and the subcomponent breakdown, but your main goal is to focus on the total length of the bars, stacked bars could work.?The opposite is not true.
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Example:
In the below graph you can easily compare the bars length and it's easy to compare between the length of the Laptop Category, yet it's not easy to compare between the length of the Phones Category. For this reason it's not correct to use Stacked Bar Graph to compare between subcategories of each bar because this will leave your audience confused.
What should you do? Change your approach and use Bar or Line graphs
Best practices for designing stacked bars
1- Place the most important category along the baseline: If one particular category is important, consider moving it closest to the baseline.
2- Consider contrast when labeling the bars: ensure that the labels have sufficient contrast against the background color of the bar.
Hope you enjoyed the article and see you later with a new Chart Type in the Data Visualization Basics Series.