Bar Charts

Bar charts are one of the best ways to communicate information. They are simple and easy to read. A few simple upgrades will take your presentation one step beyond.

First, a few critiques from an existing dashboard:

This is not to say that it’s a bad chart, it clearly shows the values of the opportunities. With a little work, we can make it better.

Simplify!

By simplifying the chart, we gain three advantages:

• It’s easier to read
• There’s an additional data point
• We could actually shrink the chart to gain space

Go to the Chart Properties to make your changes.

Use a formula in your caption title:

= 'Value of Pending Opportunities & Num((sum({$<[Opportunity.Status] -= {'6 - Lost', '5 - Installed'}>} [Pricing]),'$#,###.')

Before and After

The ‘after’ chart is less busy and easier on the eyes. Your clients won’t be able to tell you what you’ve done, but they’ll know that it ‘feels’ better.

One Step Beyond

If you dare to take it one step further on the simplicity scale, make the bars the same color and reduce their intensity. In this case, I simply increased the transparency to soften the color.

Multi color bars can confuse the user. ‘Red’ is usually bad, why is the Data bar red?