Utah Community Learning

Bar vs line vs pie, and picking the right one

Last time we made our first chart. This lesson is about making the RIGHT chart, which is a different skill and, if you ask me, the more important one.

Now, Excel and Sheets will let you make near enough any chart out of any data. Neither one checks whether that chart makes a lick of sense. It will gladly build you a pie chart from data that has no business being a pie, and it will look fine, and it will explain nothing. So the tool will not save you here. You have to know what you are looking at.

The three you actually need

There are some fifteen chart types in that menu. Pay almost none of them any mind. For everyday spreadsheet work, you need three.

Bar chart. For comparing separate things against each other. Groceries against gas against subscriptions. Category A against category B. If your question is "which one is bigger," it is a bar chart.

Line chart. For change over time. Spending by month, savings climbing, weight coming down, what have you. If the word "trend" is hiding in your question, it is a line chart.

Pie chart. For parts of a whole, and only when there are not too many parts. Five slices, fine. Twelve slices, it turns to confetti and nobody can read it. I am not much of a pie chart man myself, but they are the right choice now and then.

That is truly all. Notice that none of these is "whichever chart looks the fanciest." That is not a category.

How to actually pick

Ask yourself one question before you so much as touch the chart button: what am I trying to show, in one sentence?

Not "I want to chart my spending." Too broad. More like:

"I want to show which category eats the most money." → bar.
"I want to show whether I am spending more now than six months ago." → line.
"I want to show how my paycheck splits up." → pie, so long as you kept it to your five or six categories, the way we talked about back in the budget lessons.

If you cannot finish that sentence, you are not ready to make the chart yet. Go work out the sentence first. This is the same thing I am forever saying about spreadsheets in general: most folks do not have a spreadsheet problem, they have a question problem. Charts are only that, said louder.

A story on this, because I learned it the hard way

I spent a whole Saturday once building a chart to show our grocery spending by month. Not a quick thing, mind you; I fussed with it. Colors, labels, the axis set just so. I felt very proud, and showed Casey as though I had made him a gift.

He looked at it for about four seconds and said, "so we spend a lot in December."

And I said, yes. That is the chart working.

That is genuinely the whole point. I wanted him to look and know the one thing at once, with no explaining from me. He did. It was not exciting, it was not a whole analysis, it was one plain, obvious fact landing in four seconds. Plain and obvious is the win. Had he needed to squint and ask me three follow-up questions, I would have built the wrong chart.

Making the call, step by step

Write your one sentence first. Type it in a cell above the chart if it helps; it need not be permanent.
Match it to bar, line, or pie using the list above.
Select only the data you need. Not the whole sheet, not extra columns you are not using. Extra data muddles the chart and muddles you.
Insert your chart type. In Sheets it is Insert, then Chart. In Excel it is the Insert tab, then the chart icons, though I will admit I sometimes press the wrong one because I go back and forth between the two programs. If I fumble it in class, that is why.
Look at it with fresh eyes. Could a stranger read your one sentence off this chart in five seconds? If not, something is off, usually too many categories or too many months crammed in.

The mistake I see most

Folks try to cram everything into one chart. All twelve months, all six categories, three chart types wrestling with each other. It ends up needing a paragraph of explanation beside it, and at that point it is not a chart any longer, it is a riddle. One chart, one idea. If you have five things to show, make five small charts, not one loud one.

A small practical note as well. Pie charts with a lot of thin slices are genuinely hard to read on a screen, especially when a few categories are small. If more than one or two slices are thin slivers, that is your sign to switch to a bar chart, or to gather the small stuff into an "other" category.

Before next time

Pick one question you truly want answered from your tracking sheet, write it as one sentence, and make the chart that answers it. If you catch yourself reaching for a pie chart with eight slices, let that be your cue to stop and choose differently.