2. The Bar Chart

A bar chart looks like this:

Distribution of people by age in the UK in 2013

In this case it is a chart showing the number of people in the UK by age bands in the year 2013. (source: Office of National Statistics). This graph also shows a title to explain what it is about.

For example you can see there were 4.5 million people aged between 40 to 44 and only half a million over 90 years old.

The bar chart is excellent for:

• Showing discrete (non-continuous) data such as data sorted into bands
• Being able to compare the relative size of each data item.

This is what the data looks like as a table:

I am sure you will agree that the bar chart makes it a lot easier to see the pattern and overall shape of the data.