Types of Charts in Excel

Excel offers a wide range of charts like line charts, pie charts, scatter plots etc. and it is natural to get overwhelmed with the choice. Thus, it is helpful to understand the pros and cons of the various chart types.

In this segment, you will understand which charts are suitable for certain data types and the best ways to plot them.  

To summarise the most important thumb rules to choose charts:

• Bar charts are used when one variable is categorical and one is numeric, e.g. marital status (3 categories) and age
  • Stacked bar charts (or simply stacked charts) are used when there are more than one categorical variables, e.g. marital status and gender plotted in two different colours 
• Line charts are also used with one categorical variable and one numeric variable
  • If time is a variable to be plotted, it almost always plotted on the x-axis of a line chart
•  Pie charts have poor readability and thus you should avoid using them
• Scatter plots are used when you want to plot two numeric variables e.g. age and income
  • You can add transparency in scatter plots to improve readability  

In the following lecture, you will see a few more charts and try to answer the questions - when should which chart should be used?

Despite having a wide range of options of chart types, the most commonly used ones are bar charts, line charts and scatter plots. The reason is that these are easy to read. In fact, pie charts sometimes decrease the readability of data!

In the next lecture, you will see why pie charts are usually terrible and the cases in which line / bar / scatter charts work best.

With this, you have reached the end of Data Visualisation in Excel. You can now choose an appropriate chart for presenting information in a readable manner. Remember that the most important principle of creating charts is that they should improve readability and reduce the time taken to understand the key pieces of information.