One of the most commonly used objects is the column chart. It can provide you an answer on the question ‘how many’ for a specific time and for different categories at once. You can also use a time indication as category, which allows you to track a metric over time. Let’s dive into more detail.
The classic column chart uses vertical bars to compare numeric values across different categories or over time. The longer the bar, the higher the value, which is displayed on the vertical axis. It is also possible to group data from one bar into subdivisions to give even more insights inside a category itself, which goes by the name stacked column chart.
The column chart can be found underneath the bar & columns charts section. By drag & dropping it into the canvas, data can be added to the three dataslots ‘category’, ‘measure’ and ‘group by’. Let’s focus on each of them, illustrated with an example.
Data columns with data types ‘hierarchy’ and ‘date time’ are a perfect fit for this slot.
The data added to the category slot defines the number of columns - or categories - that will appear, as such five different values will result in five columns. The measures from the same value will be aggregated into one column.
The example below demonstrates how a data column containing years is added to the chart. Without measure data, each column represents the number of rows per year found in the dataset, which is like the count rows aggregation.
Data columns with data type ‘numeric’ are a perfect fit for this slot.
The measure slot defines the numeric value of a category. The higher the value, the longer the column. Different aggregations can be set in order to be able to execute different calculations, e.g. the average.
In this example, we use a data column containing volume data to show the number of passengers travelling per year. The way of displaying the numbers on the axis can be changed in the slot settings.
Data columns with data type ‘hierarchy’ are a perfect fit for this slot.
This third slot gives the opportunity to analyze data in an extra dimension. By adding data, the bars will show subdivisions resulting in enhanced insights. This is a really powerful feature and has three different modes : grouped, stacked and 100% stacked.
In this example, we see how many passengers travelled per year and per country.
If you want to enable your viewers to play around with the three stacked modes, you can activate a drop down menu in the chart itself to make this possible.
It is not always easy to interpret the exact values, luckily you can toggle on the option ‘show values’ in the general settings of the charts where you can also choose to display different kind of percentages. This makes your life easier!
Sometimes, you only want to display the top x categories, which is possible by activating a limit. You can also choose their way of sorting - ascending or descending depending on the measure or the category names.
Want to know the average measure of your categories? This is really easy to obtain by adding a guideline. Play around with the layout options here.
The legend in this chart can be used to show or hide specific elements by clicking them.
Charts that are similar to the column chart, are the bar chart and pyramid chart.
If you have further questions on this topic, don’t hesitate to contact us. We are happy to help!