Bar Charts
Bar charts are a popular tool to display data with greater precision than Pie Charts. When you have more than four categories that you are comparing, and there isn't a lot of difference among their size, pie charts give up. As they fail to help the reader with a clear picture of who the winner is and how each compares to the rest.
Let's go back to our Staple food example.
| Staple Food |
Share of Global Intake
|
| Maize Corn | 19.50% |
| Rice | 16.50% |
| Wheat | 15.00% |
| Cassava | 2.60% |
| Soybeans | 2.10% |
| Potatoes | 1.70% |
| Sorghum | 1.20% |
| Sweet Potato | 0.60% |
| Yams | 0.40% |
| Plantain | 0.30% |
Let's plot this data in a bar chart and compare it with the pie chart that we saw earlier.
Pie Chart
Bar Chart
As you can see, the Bar chart makes it a lot easier to make sense of the data.
Bar charts can also come in horizontal forms. This form is especially useful when the labels are long.
They can also be stacked. This is useful when you compare the values over two periods of time, for example. Imagine showing the same bar chart on staple foods with data collected in 2000 versus 2021. In such a case, a stacked bar chart would come handy.