ANATOMY OF A BAR CHART Simple Bar Chart
ANATOMY OF A BAR CHART: Simple Bar Chart Building a Bar Chart: Bar Charts present qualitative, categorical data. There a number of Bar Chart variations. The Simple Bar Chart to the right presents the categories of one variable. Title Frequencies (counts) or Percentages are shown on the vertical axis. 1) Draw the horizontal & vertical borders. 2) Place category labels (the variable’s values; e. g. Clerical, etc. ) and the variable name (e. g. Employment Category) on the horizontal axis. 3) Label the y-axis (Count, freq. , percent) and insert the scale being used (e. g. 0 – 400 ). 4) Draw the bars; each of equal width and to a height representing the frequency or percent of the data they represent. Remember the bars do not touch. 5) Add a title describing the chart’s contents. Additional features that may enhance the presentation include Horizontal Gridlines, which help visually interpret the counts or percentages and Bar Labeling, which may include either the count or percentage represented by the bars. The height of each bar represents the frequency or percentage in each category. Label both horizontal and vertical axes (here Employment Category and Count) and include a title. Categories of the variable are shown along the horizontal axis. Note the spacing between bars. The bars of a Bar Chart do not touch. Before there was a Bar Chart, there were individual values for each unit in the sample or population. These values were summed to form the basis for drawing the bars, which represent the variable’s categories. The category counts for this Bar Chart were Clerical 363 (76. 6%), Custodial 27 (5. 7%), and Manager 86 (17. 7%), for a total of 474 employees.
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