Bar Chart
Last updated
Last updated
A Bar Chart shows the set of categories in a field and the relative sizes or weights of those categories. It helps you understand how values in the field and table are distributed.
Aggregation: choose what bar length represents.
The aggregation option determines what the bar length represents. Bar length may be proportional to the number of items (rows) with that category value; this is the default. Alternatively, it may be proportional to the sum of the corresponding values in another field (a weight field); or it may be proportional to the average value of the corresponding rows in a weight field, or to the ratio of the corresponding values in 2 other numeric fields.
Clustered: multiple statistics per category.
If clustered, the chart may be colored by the Y field names or by the table, and the color scale used to color may be chosen. From: Advanced Property "Cluster Color Scale".
Stacked: color stacking shows contribution from another field.
If a bar chart shows a field from a data table colored by a different field, the colors for that field are shown "stacked". This lets you see how values of another field map to values of the bar chart's field.
Orientation: vertical or horizontal bars.
Zooming: manage large numbers of categories.
A Bar Chart will scale so that all category bars are visible initially. If there is enough space, each bar is labeled. As the number of bars increases, the bars are "packed together" and the zoom bar at the bottom of the display may be used to zoom (magnify/de-magnify) or scroll the display.
If there are too many bars to show every bar even as a single pixel line, then tick marks or a bar at the "top" of the chart will indicate overplotting.
You can also suppress the zoom bar. From: Advanced Property "Allow Magnify".
Goal Lines: show performance versus a target.
Adding a Goal Line, using a Project Variable:
Enter the Goal Name in the 'Goal Name:' field.
Select an existing Variable, from the 'Select Variable:' list.
Select the 'OK' button.
6. The Goal Line is added to the Bar Chart.
Spine Plot: compare selected percentages.
Bar sizing: how are bars drawn?
Bars may be sized to all Fit In Window (so that all are visible and scrolling is not required, but overplotting may be necessary if screen resolution is insufficient--the default), at Normal Text size (so there is room to display the label for each bar, but scrolling may be required), or at a width of one Pixel per bar (guaranteeing that all bars are plotted separately, but scrolling may be required). From: Advanced Property "Line Mode".
Bar order: what order are my bars in?
You can choose how the bars for categories are ordered: in Original Order (the order they were encountered in the table), By Label, By Size, By Selected magnitude, or By Percent Selected. If bars are ordered By Selected or By Percent Selected, making a selection can cause the bar order to change.
By default, the bars in Bar Charts are ordered By Size, unless the Field is of Date type, when the default is By Label. Order By Label is generally useful if the category names have a natural ordering (e.g., year). Original Order is only useful in the rare case that the input data order is significant.
Ordering may also be reversed by any of these criteria (e.g., Reverse By Size, Reverse By Label, ...).
Bar labeling: which category names are shown?
You can control which bars are labeled. By default, Best Fit mode is used, where as many bar labels are shown as will fit without overlapping. Alternatively, you may Label All Bars, Turn Labels Off, or Label Selected (or partially selected) bars. From: Advanced Property "Label Mode"
Bar measure labels: how bar weights are labelled.
Label size: how big are my labels?
You can control how much of your category labels are visible. By default, the chart tries to balance the amount of screen space devoted to the data graphics and to labels. This may cause long labels to be cut off. You can adjust this size by moving the mouse over the X axis until it changes to a double-headed arrow; then use the left mouse button to drag the axis to the location you want.
Changing orientation to show horizontal bars may also provide more label space.
Locate: where am I?
The coordinates of the mouse while within the area where the bars are drawn are continuously shown on the X and Y axes. Move the mouse over the chart to see this.
Customizable Focus: what is this item?
You focus on a bar by pointing at it for a second; a box with details for the current item pops up. (Holding the CTRL or SHIFT key causes immediate display of focus.)
From: Advanced Property "Focus Format String"
Missing values: data that isn't there.
Data may contain missing values: a special value indicating that there is no data. This can be important for some types of data: for example in a survey, you may want to treat unanswered questions differently than questions that were answered. Missing values in a field are shown as a "-" category by default, or you may specify not to show a bar for the missing category, or use a different string to represent them in the project.
From: Advanced Property "Show Missing Values"; Tables page in the in Project Workshop.
Unmatched Bar: representing rows in a selection-linked table that don't match any in this table.
When a Bar Chart is showing the categories in a field from a table that is selection-linked to another table, the name of the other table can be entered in the "Unmatched from Linked Table" property. This can cause an additional bar to be displayed, with a label as specified in the "Unmatched Bar Label" property, whose length represents the number of rows in the other table that are not linked to any rows in this table.
From: Advanced Properties "Unmatched from Linked Table", "Unmatched Bar Label".
Text: labels and titles.
Show Unselected: included unselected bars?
Negative Handling: how are negative values aggregated?
Positive aggregate values are shown by positive bars (above the axis), and negative values by negative bars (below the axis). Categories that contain both negative and positive weight values can be shown in two ways: "net" or "separated". In "net" display, the default, the positive and negative amounts are summed and a single bar is displayed. In "separated" mode, negative and positive values are separately aggregated and shown as two opposing bars. Separated mode can reveal the magnitude of negative and positive components of a total that are otherwise hidden by the net. In separated mode, a line on one bar indicates the net value.
From: Advanced Property "Display Net Values".
See also:
If the aggregation is the average of the weight for a category, error bars are drawn showing the first standard deviation for each category; this helps you understand the variability in each category. Color stacking (see "Stacked" below) is disabled for Average and Ratio modes. From: Chart Toolbar "Configure Data" ().
Multiple weighting fields may be selected for the same category; these are shown as a group of bars for the category. All bars share the same Y scale. From: Chart Toolbar "Configure Data" ().
Color stacking can be disabled via the "Stack Colors" property in the Advanced Chart Properties pane; then bars with multiple colors are shown in the Selected Data custom chart color. This can be useful for very large datasets, since color stacking can be quite compute-intensive. From: , Advanced Property "Stack Colors".
A Bar Chart may have its bars aligned vertically (the default) or horizontally. Vertical alignment is commonly seen, but horizontal alignment provides more readable labels. From: Chart Configuration checkbox "Display Horizontally", Chart Toolbar "Rotate Chart" (), Advanced Property "Vertical Bars".
A Goal Line is a line parallel to the X axis that shows a target level. There may be multiple Goal Lines in a Bar Chart. Goal Lines are set at a particular Y axis value. The goal line may be used to select all categories above or below the goal. From: Chart Toolbar "Add Goal Line" ().
Select the "Add Goal Line" (), button from the Bar Chart Toolbar.
Select the 'Add Goal' ()button.
In this mode the weight of each category is indicated by the width of the bar rather than the height. You can think of this mode as being a flattened Pie Chart. The value of this mode appears when comparing selected subsets: the height of the selected subset is proportional to the percentage of the category weight that is selected, so partial selection can be compared as a percentage across categories. A partially-selected Pie Chart allows the same percentage comparison, but only between adjacent slices. From: Chart Toolbar "Display As Spine Plot" (), Advanced Property "Spine Plot".
A Secondary Bar Order may also be specified, which has an effect if multiple bars have the same precedence under the primary ordering scheme. For instance, if Bar Order is By Percent Selected, and several bars are completely selected and several are completely unselected, the selected and unselected subsets would be grouped and each ordered in the Secondary Bar Order. From: Chart Toolbar "Set Display Order" (), Advanced Properties "Bar Order", "Secondary Bar Order".
Bars may be labelled with their Y axis weight value. Labels are never drawn to overlap, so a subset of labels is automatically chosen. In the Advanced Properties pane, you can choose which of 4 measures to show ("Bar Label Measure"), the font for the labels ("Bar Label Font"), and specify if large numeric values should be shortened ("Bar Label Abbreviated"). Options for "Bar Label Measure" are "Percent of Category", "Percent of Total", "Selected Weight", "Total Weight", and "No Label". In the toolbar below the chart, you can also choose which measure to show. From: Chart Toolbar "Label With Weights" (), Advanced Properties "Bar Label Measure", "Bar Label Font", "Bar Label Abbreviated".
You can customize the focus detail information by changing the FocusFormat template string. Clearing this string suppresses focus labeling. See
Text for the chart title and axis titles may be changed, along with the text font. Display of the title is optional. From: Chart Toolbar (), Advanced Properties "Axis Font", "Display Title", "Label Font", "Title", "Title Font", "X Axis Font", "Y Axis Font"
Unselected bars may be omitted. This is especially useful for focusing on selected data if there are a large number of bars. From: Chart Toolbar "Display Unselected Data" (), Advanced Property "Show Unselected"
