A reader need go no further than page two of Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics before reading, “We will also come to realize why a histogram is not a bar chart and why many other graphics ...

Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

Excel’s chart features can turn your spreadsheet data into compelling visual communications—if you know what to do. This guide will walk you through the basics of setting up trends, percentages, ...

This post recommends using Trellis plots instead of 3D bar charts for three-dimensional (three variable) data. In Winner of the Bad Graph Contest Announced, I promised to present alternatives to Excel ...

Bar charts and box plots are omnipresent in the scientific literature. They are typically used to visualize quantities associated with a set of items. Representing the data accurately, however, ...

Bar charts are too frequently used to communicate data that they cannot represent well. We strongly encourage the use of more appropriate plots to display statistical samples. Bar charts are a simple ...