Bar Charts

Last updated: November 6, 2024

Bar charts are the default visual for creating any new Block. Once you select your Data visualization option (📄 Blocks), whether using Explore or Custom Data, there are some further customizations that can be made to showcase different sets of data. We’ll start with one example of showcasing SaaS revenue for different products. By selecting “Product” for the row, “Month” for our column, and filtering our data to only show "Income" accounts - we’ve created this chart:

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By going into the second pane, Options, located in the top right of the customization pane, we can start changing how this data is displayed:

Options:

  • Vertical or Horizontal: This allows us to quickly flip our X and Y axes.

  • Stack or Group: Stacking adds all data for a given axis into a single bar, showing a total. Grouping will display each individual slice of data as its own bar.

  • Row Options: This gives greater flexibility in how each of the rows is displayed. You can choose whether each individual row is shown as a Bar or Line. Additionally, you can opt to invert a sign (in the instance where you might want to show expenses as negatives even though they come through as positive values in your ERP), or use a different axes if you’re mixing numbers in completely different scales (Product Revenue vs Unit Sales).

The “Format” pane is more heavily focused on the configuration of both axes, how data is formatted, and what labels to display.

Format:

  • Y-Axis. Title text added will be displayed on the left side of the graph. The format drop-down allow you to select for some pre-created formats to display values on the left (or right for a secondary axis) with the ability to use Excel’s custom-format if required. The range will control both the bottom and top-most values of the axis.

  • X-Axis: Title text added will be displayed on the bottom of the graph. Label grouping allows you to choose between showing the full name of each tick-mark or shortening (ellipses) or hiding the name based on its length. The format will generally auto-populate between either a Number or Date, depending on what was chosen for the axis.

  • Labels: In stacked bars, this will display the individual value of each bar. The total data label will show the sum of each X-axis tick. For grouped bar graphs, these options will not appear.

  • Tooltip: When hovering over the graph to show data, the format selected is what will be displayed. For example, $200,000 will show as $0.2M for “Accounting Millions” and $200K for “Accounting Thousands”.