Basic bar charts
Let’s have a look at bar charts. You're probably already familiar with standard bar charts, but as there are quite a few chart types that visualise data using bars, we'll highlight some key differences here.
Note that this article focuses on basic bar charts, where we look at a snapshot of current data, rather than data over time. For those, read this article instead!
🚀 Pro tip: As with most charts, remember that basic bar charts are interactive and allow you to click into the chart to drill down into the corresponding data records.
💅 Pro design tip: Most of the basic bar charts, allow you to define custom segments, by specifying groups with specific names (”labels”), choosing values to include in each group, and which colours to apply.
Single bar charts - Vertical Bar and Horizontal Bar
Let’s start with two chart types in one go! Vertical and Horizontal Bar charts are functionally exactly the same; the only difference is the design.
These are the simplest forms of bar charts. They have a numerical (quantitative) axis, and qualitative categories on the other axis. Changing between Vertical and Horizontal Bars flips what is on the x-axis and what is on the y-axis.
Use cases include (number/category axis):
Number of Companies / Phase
Number of Conversations / Type
Average Company Health Score / Owner
Sum of Company ARR / Tier
Sum of Invoice Amount / Status
To configure one of these charts, you:
Choose a model - e.g. Company
Set up one axis:
Counting the number of records (e.g. number of Companies)
Choosing a property (from a choice of metrics and fields) plus an operation (sum, average, max or min) - e.g. sum of ARR - this is one axis
Set up the other axis by choosing which property defines the bars - categories such as Company Owner
💅 Pro design tip: Create custom segments to further define what the bars correspond to, and how they are coloured, with each segment corresponding to a bar. This is a way to reduce the number of bars and specify their colours. If you choose Health Score or CSM Score as the category axis, Planhat will automatically colour the bars for you, corresponding to bad/medium/good!
Top List Bar
Top List Bar charts are similar to Vertical Bars, but the data you can display is slightly more restricted, as they’re designed specifically for ranking records based on a property (a suitable metric or a field).
Typical examples are:
Top 5 Companies by ARR
Bottom 10 Companies by Health Score
How does it compare to a Top List Table?
Displaying your ranked data in a Top List Bar chart is great for spotting trends, as it’s very easy to see the relative sizes of bars, whereas if you’re just looking at the numbers in a table, relative sizes can be hard to spot. However, displaying the data in a Top List table takes up less space, and you might find it easier to focus on the specific numbers (rather than relative sizes).
It’s very easy to configure a Top List Bar chart:
Choose a model and a property (e.g. Company ARR)
Choose whether to sort the bars as descending (to show the top) or ascending (to show the bottom)
Choose the limit - how many bars (e.g. top 5)
Multi Bar charts - Vertical and Horizontal
As with single-bar charts, with multi-bar charts, you can choose between vertical and horizontal versions. Multi-bar charts have a lot of similarities to single-bar charts, but you add in an additional property to divide/categorise the data, to add extra context.
What do we mean by this? For example:
If the Single Bar chart is:
Sum of Company ARR / Owner
Then the Multi Bar chart could be:
Sum of Company ARR / Owner / Phase
Therefore, configuring a Multi Bar chart is very similar to a Single Bar chart, you just have an additional property to select:
Choose a model - e.g. Company
Set up one axis:
Counting the number of records (e.g. number of Companies)
Choosing a property (from a choice of metrics and fields) plus an operation (sum, average, max or min) - e.g. sum of ARR
Set up the other axis by choosing which property defines the category - categories such as Company Owner
Choose what defines each bar by selecting another property to further split the data on the category axis (e.g. Phase)
💅 Pro design tip: Just like Single Bar charts, Multi Bar charts allow you to specify custom segments, which define the individual bars, or limit results, reducing the main groupings on the category axis.
Vertical Stacked Bar
The final chart type in the “Bar Chart” category is the Vertical Stacked Bar.
A Vertical Stacked Bar chart is pretty much functionally exactly the same as a Vertical Multi Bar chart. Therefore, the use cases and method to configure that chart are basically the same. The only difference is that rather than the additional property corresponding to individual bars, in a Stacked Bar chart, they are segments of the same bar. This means that they are perfect for showing the total of the whole category (axis property), while multi-bar charts are better when you want to see relative sizes.
Here is the exact same data displayed in both:
A variant of the Vertical Stacked Bar chart is using the toggle “100% stacked bar”. Usually, the Stacked Bar chart shows the absolute totals, but if this switch is toggled on, each bar is set as 100%, and the segments show the relative proportions (rather than absolute values), making it more similar to a share chart.
💅 Pro design tip: Stacked Bar charts again allow you to specify custom segments, which here define bar segments; or limit results, which reduces the number of bars.