Bar & Column Charts

Quick reference

• 00:05 In this module, we're gonna look specifically at bar and column charts.
• 00:08 We're gonna start with the fresh canvass here and
• 00:11 then we need to create a new stacked bar chart right here.
• 00:14 What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw with two measures on this.
• 00:17 I'm gonna throw a budget on here and I'm gonna throw my sales on here as well.
• 00:22 And I might decide that maybe I want my sales to show up ahead of budget, so
• 00:26 I'll just move this until it snaps in there.
• 00:29 And when I'm at this point, I'm gonna go and add a category.
• 00:33 And you'll see that this is what it looks like when we
• 00:35 actually get a stacked bar chart.
• 00:38 Now, bar charts and column charts are the same thing, just rotated 90 degrees.
• 00:42 We have three types of each.
• 00:44 We have the stacked bar and the stacked column.
• 00:47 We have the clustered bar chart which actually shows the individual series so
• 00:51 they can be compared, and the clustered column chart.
• 00:54 We also have the 100% stacked bar chart which will show
• 00:57 everything as a proportion, and the 100% stacked column.
• 01:01 Personally, the ones that I find that I use the most are the clustered bar and
• 01:06 my clustered column charts.
• 01:08 So which you decide you like better is really up to you.
• 01:12 The key for all of these things is that we take our values and
• 01:14 drop them into the values area and we throw our access into the access area.
• 01:19 When we drop something into the access area, it automatically makes the opposite
• 01:22 access for us based on the proportion of what comes out of the value field.
• 01:26 So that's kind of nice, it actually sets it up, all ready to go and what not.
• 01:31 Now, you'll also find that if you drag multiple things into your access area
• 01:36 you can change the way this works because you'll activate drill downs.
• 01:39 So I could grab say, a location and put the location name on top of my axis.
• 01:44 Now at this point, I now have the drill down ability to say, here let's go in and
• 01:47 take a look at squints and that will now show me the sales that are here.
• 01:51 And if I want to drill even further down, I can go and add Item Name in here.
• 01:56 And now we'll say let's do a drill into wine and
• 01:58 I can see what my sales are made up.
• 02:00 One challenge I have here, I do not budget the level of sales item,
• 02:06 and that's why the budget is showing in full for each line,
• 02:09 so that doesn't make a lot of sense here.
• 02:11 So I'm actually gonna take this off because it's too much.
• 02:14 If I were doing that and I wanted to see the sales item,
• 02:17 I'd probably get rid of budget and try not to make a comparison there.
• 02:22 Some common things that we could change around this chart now, let's see.
• 02:25 We could go over to our formatting area and we could say, you know what,
• 02:30 the legend.
• 02:31 We have a legend on here right now, but
• 02:33 I'm not really sure I'm liking where it is, it should really be below.
• 02:35 So I'm gonna click on this and say, hey, let's change the legend to the bottom.
• 02:40 And that will actually move the legend down nicely to the bottom
• 02:43 of where it needs to be.
• 02:44 I could change the font size up a little bit, make it a little bit bigger, say ten.
• 02:48 And now, I could turn that off.
• 02:52 I don't need to necessarily show my y-axis if I have data labels.
• 02:57 So I'm gonna turn my data labels on, and you'll see they pop up above the chart.
• 03:01 And now I can turn my y-axis off when I don't need the grid lines or
• 03:04 anything else there.
• 03:05 So that's looking a little bit better, looks a little bit happier and whatnot.
• 03:08 And with the data labels, I even have the ability to go in and say, you know what,
• 03:13 let's go and change a little bit about this.
• 03:16 What is the display?
• 03:17 I'm gonna show it to display in thousands and
• 03:20 that's gonna give me something that looks okay.
• 03:23 I only want to have one decimal place on it,
• 03:26 there they are that's a little bit better.
• 03:29 And maybe I wanna change the data label size up a little bit to say 12 point,
• 03:33 maybe a little bit too big, let's go down to say 10 and let's leave it around there.
• 03:39 What else could I play around with in here?
• 03:41 I know, how about the title.
• 03:43 We have a title.
• 03:46 The title is called Sales Dollars and Budget Dollars by Location, Name, and
• 03:49 Category.
• 03:50 So we could call this something different.
• 03:53 We could call this Sales versus Budget Analysis.
• 03:59 And just go with it without for right now.
• 04:02 We can change the font color to a nice black.
• 04:06 We'll put it centered above the chart.
• 04:08 And plainly, that chart title is too small.
• 04:10 Let's go and dial it up to say a 16 point and away we go.
• 04:14 So there's lots of options that we have to play around here.
• 04:16 Those are some common ones that I generally end up using for my bar and
• 04:20 column charts.
• 04:21 It all works with the drill down now.
• 04:23 As you can see, we can drill up, we can drill back down, we can
• 04:26 go into focus mode and see it even bigger, and it looks like it works quite nice.
• 04:30 So that is bar and column charts that are actually working there and
• 04:35 the different options that we have for formatting bills.

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