How to Choose The Best Type of Charts And Graphs to Presnt Your Data?

Making charts is an activity that every employee should know. In business field, charts and graphs play an important role in planning, organizing and explaining various aspects. The most important question that arises during such scenarios is choosing the best chart or graph that will successfully serve you purpose. As they can easily represent large quantities of data so that it can be summarized into a small form that is easily understandable by everyone, the reliance over them for various business activities like the following is very high-

Website performance

Charts are often used to summarize the data of performance of a certain website. Charts can be used to explain the increase or decrease in the performance of your business’s website over a fixed period of time. Using this information the team can analyze the cause of rise and fall and can easily make plans to improve further.

Sales performance

Every business uses graphs and charts for this purpose. Using the charts, managers can represent the sales performance over a fixed period of time. This allows them to easily consult with other employees and managers to create better plans which can enhance the sales even further.

Adoption of strategies

Adopting new strategies is of utmost importance if businesses want to grow. This is why when a new strategy comes up in minds of managers, they often create a chart with assumptions as to how it will help the business to grow over the time. It also makes it easier for the rest of the team to understand the strategies and practices.

Marketing Campaigns

Charts are very useful for marketing campaign’s planning and analyzing the results. While making a new marketing campaigns, employees often make charts for showcasing how will it help the businesses and once its over, they make charts to understand if it was successful or not.

These were just few of the many scenarios that require use of graphs and charts for businesses. People are often looking for new ways to visually represent several data in order to make them easily understandable so that more information can be extracted from them. In order to achieve all that, the first step is to improve the way you represent your data so that people can understand your message in a better way.

• Part 1. The Types of graphs and charts
• Part 2. Questions before deciding which charts and graphs to go for
• Part 3. How to make professional charts and graphs in a few clicks

Part 1. The Types of graphs and charts

Before you jump into making a graph or a chart, it is important that you should understand the various types of charts and graphs that are available on the graphing tools

Column Charts

Columns charts are most suitable if your objective is to compare different data sets over a pre defined period of time. They generally utilize vertical bars that are used to represent different data over X and Y axis.

Bar Graphs

They are one of the most common types of graphs used in businesses. These are just column charts with a horizontal orientation. They are useful for comparing more than 10 different data sets.

Line Graph

Line graphs are mostly used to represent trends over a certain period of time. They can represent growth or change in the trends. They are most suitable if the data set is in a continuous format.

Dual Axis Chart

This chart utilizes 2 ‘Y’ axis place vertically parallel to each other with a shared ‘X’ axis. They are used when you need to represent a continuous set of data with grouping over a period of time. They are best to portray co-relation between the sets of data.

Area chart

It is basically a line graph that is filled with different shades of color to portray the area covered by each data type. They are extremely helpful in portraying part to whole relations like visualizing individual sales rep.

Part 2. Questions before deciding which charts and graph to go for

The following questions will help you to choose the graph or the chart that will suit your requirements best.

1) Do you wish to compare different values?

Charts are mostly used to compare different values that are present in Data. If your aim is that only you can go for column charts, bar graphs, pie charts and line graphs

2) Do you wish to showcase the composition of a particular object?

If your aim is to understand the different elements that make up a particular object such as gender based division of customer base, visitors from various platform on your website etc. For these purposes you can use stacked column charts, pie charts and area charts.

3) Do you aim to understand the data’s distribution?

If your aim is to understand the range of different information in your values, normal tendencies and the outliers, line graphs, scatter charts, bar graphs and column graphs are perfect.

4) Are you trying to analyze a trend in your data?

If you are planning on analyzing as to how your data set has performed over a certain period of time, you can use Dual axis graphs, line charts and column graphs.

5) Are you trying to understand the relations between the different data?

If your aim is to understand the relationship between one or more variables in your data set then it is better to utilize bubble charts, scatter plots charts and line graphs.

Part 3. How to make professional charts and graphs in a few clicks

Making professional level graphs isn’t the easiest task that you can do. There are lots of things that make up a good professional level graph chart like the right type of style, clarity, interactive approach etc.

There are a lot of latest and advanced tools that can be used to create graph charts online. One of the most powerful and trusted tool according to experts is Visme. This is a great tool for beginners as you can easily create high quality online graphs and charts due to its powerful features. This tool allows you to create an animated, customized, interactive and high quality chart in just a few clicks. The steps to make charts and graphs using Visme are as follows

Step 1. Login to Visme’s official website

The first step is to search for Visme’s official website on your web browser. Once done, login to your account, if you don’t have an account, you can easily sign for free by providing your details. After you log in, the tool will take you to the graph generator. Now click on the create option present on the left side of the screen and choose from the various types of charts and graphs that Visme can help you make.

Step 2. Feed the data according to your needs

As you have selected the type of chart, you will notice that a template is now visible on your screen. On the right side you will notice the option to feed the data that you want manually. Visme also allows you to import data from an Excel sheet, Google docs or even from an online source. Visme also allows you to link it from a website so that it can be updated in real time. Now you will have the basic layout of your chart, use the various customization tools to adjust the graph according to your requirements. You can easily tweak colors, sizes and other aspects.

Step 3. Save and share it to your subordinates

Now that you have completed every step successfully, you will have your chart ready to be saved and shared. Analyze it for the last time so that you don’t oversee any mistake or issue in it. Once done, you can save it in your hard disk, share it on social media, avail it in image format, get a PDF copy and even save it as a HTML5 document for easy integration with websites.

Conclusion

There are lots of tools that can help you prepare graphs and charts easily. One of the first things to analyze while choosing the most suitable tool for your graphing needs is to make sure that the tool is easy to use and can offer you enough customizability features. Visme is one of the best tools in terms of features and ease of uses. It allows the users to make interactive graphs and charts that have professional level. Hence, you should definitely visit their website if you want a great tool that is easy to use for making graphs for your business or work place.