Visual Rhetoric & Slidecraft
Effective Chart Selection
Choose the right chart type to tell the clearest story with your data.
What it is
Before & after
“Using a pie chart to show 12 different categories or a line chart for unrelated categorical data.”
“Bar chart to compare quarterly sales across regions, line chart to show customer acquisition trends over 24 months.”
When you’ll use it
Trend analysis: Line charts for performance over time, area charts for cumulative effects, slope charts for before/after comparisons
Category comparison: Bar charts for rankings, grouped bars for multi-category comparison, stacked bars for part-to-whole with categories
Relationship exploration: Scatter plots for correlations, bubble charts for three-variable relationships, heat maps for matrix comparisons
Pro tip
Match the chart to your message: comparison (bars), trend (lines), part-of-whole (pie), correlation (scatter).
Questions & answers
3 questionsLearn more
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