A chart is a graphical representation of data, in which “the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart”. A chart can represent tabular numeric data, functions or some kinds of qualitative structure and provides different info.
Charts are often used to ease understanding of large quantities of data and the relationships between parts of the data. Charts can usually be read more quickly than the raw data. They are used in a wide variety of fields, and can be created by hand (often on graph paper) or by computer using a charting application.
Certain types of charts are more useful for presenting a given data set than others. For example, data that presents percentages in different groups (such as “satisfied, not satisfied, unsure”) are often displayed in a pie chart, but may be more easily understood when presented in a horizontal bar chart. On the other hand, data that represents numbers that change over a period of time (such as “annual revenue from 1990 to 2000”) might be best shown as a line chart.
There are around eleven types of charts like: Histogram, Bar chart, Pie chart, Line chart, Timeline chart, Organizational chart, Tree chart, Flow chart, Area chart, Radar chart, and Gantt chart, but the most common ones of them are:
A Pie Chart can only display one series of data. e.g. Flowers and displays the values for that series as proportional slices of a pie.
The Column Chart very effectively shows the comparison of one or more series of data points. But the Clustered Column Chart is especially useful in comparing multiple data series. One variation of this chart type is the Stacked Column Chart. In a Stacked Column Chart, the data points for each time period are “stacked” instead of “clustered.” This chart type lets us see the percentage of the total for each data point in the series.
The Line Chart is especially effective in displaying trends. In a Line Chart, the vertical axis (Y-axis) always displays numeric values and the horizontal axis (X-axis) displays time or other category.
The Bar Chart is like a Column Chart lying on its side. The horizontal axis of a Bar Chart contains the numeric values. The first chart below is the Bar Chart for our single series, Flowers.
Area Charts are like Line Charts except that the area below the plot line is solid. And like Line Charts, Area Charts are used primarily to show trends over time or other category. The chart at left is an Area Chart for our single series.
The purpose of a Scatter Chart is to observe how the values of two series compares over time or other category.