While bar charts look like column charts on their sides, bar charts serve different purposes and can be extremely useful. This article will give you an overview of how to build and use bar charts.
Anytime you have longer chart labels (as opposed to dates), a bar chart will allow those to be easier to read. Displaying any data by date will be best visualized as a column chart so you can read it left to right.
Use Cases
Sales Leaderboard. Any kind of leaderboard metric top 10 or top 15 makes for a great bar chart. This kind of a metric allows you to see the progress your sales reps have made towards reaching a goal or quota. This can also be tweaked to other team metrics, such as chats by support representative.
Success of Products. If you are an eCommerce business, one potential use of a bar chart would be to track the sales on different products. Are there certain products that are selling better than others?
How to Build a Bar Chart
To build a bar chart, first log in to your Grow account and click Add Metric. Choose your data source, connect your data, and press continue.
In Edit Metric, click on the chart type menu to view the list of charts. Go ahead and select Bar Chart.
Next, you will need to select your data series.
Then, you'll need to select a grouping. The first time you create a metric and select a data series, a grouping will automatically be populated if the data you have has a date column.
Once you have selected your data series and grouping, you can start to format those selections.
Finally, be sure to add chart labels and key values to your metric.
Using 2-Value Axes
Given that this chart type is often used for comparisons, one formatting option that may help your chart is to use 2-value axes.
2-value axes are useful when each data series may be on a different scale. For example, if my sales revenue is in the thousands, but my actual count of sales is in the hundreds, 2-value axes would allow you to see both without unnecessarily squishing one data series or the other because of its relative size.
To enable 2-value axes, click the three-dot menu on a data series, then assign a data series to the top axis.
