Visualizing categorical information using bar charts

We saw how the Table visualization is perfect for showing and ordering detailed information. It's quite similar to a spreadsheet. The Bar Chart visualization is very good for visualizing categorical information, that is, where you have categories with supporting hard numbers—sales by region, for example. The region is the category, whereas the sales is the hard number or fact.

Bar charts are typically used to show a distribution. Depending on your data or your analytic requirement, the bars can be ordered by value, placed side by side, stacked on top of each other, or arranged vertically or horizontally.

There is a special case of the category and value combination and that is where you want ...

Get TIBCO Spotfire – A Comprehensive Primer now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.