Bar, column, line and area
The comparison and trend workhorses, including stacked and combo variants.
The visuals most dashboards are mostly made of.
Column and bar
Same chart, different orientation. Column is vertical, bar is horizontal.
Use bar when category names are long — horizontal labels stay readable where vertical ones turn diagonal or get truncated. Use column when the axis is time-like and reads naturally left to right.
Three variants of each:
- Clustered — categories side by side. Best for comparing values directly.
- Stacked — segments summed into one bar. Shows total and composition, at the cost of making the middle segments hard to compare.
- 100% stacked — every bar the same height, showing proportion only.
Line
For change over time. Multiple lines compare series; keep it to a handful before it becomes a tangle.
Area
A line with the space beneath it filled — emphasises volume. Stacked area shows how a total splits over time, with the same caveat as stacked bars: only the bottom band starts from a flat baseline, so the others are harder to read than they look.
Combo (column + line)
Two measures with different units on one chart, using a secondary axis — revenue as columns, conversion rate as a line. Genuinely useful, and easy to abuse: two axes can be scaled to imply a relationship that is not there. Use it when the pairing is meaningful, not to save space.