A Simple Barchart

Now we have our data keyed in, the next stage is to add a ‘Barchart’ element to the blank graphics frame. Switch back to the left-hand ‘Chart’ tab and press F12 to show the split-screen window on the right. For the moment, ignore the ‘Templates’ tab (these are complete ‘canned’ charts rather like document templates in Word) and have a look at the various possibilities on the ‘Chart elements’ tab:

You can change this window to show small icons, or a ‘Details’ view if you prefer words to pictures. You might also notice that I have been fooling with the heading placement, font and colour! To add a barchart to the working definition, just drag it across to the left-hand window and drop it in the empty space at the bottom.

Your Chart tab will now look like:

When you first add a chart ‘verb’ to the definition, it always plots a notional series, called {data}, which is simply a placeholder so that you can see that you have the right type of chart in the preview window. This is what you can see now, and what we should do next is to change it to show our subscriber data.

Remember that you called the columns ‘Supplier’, ‘1999’ and ‘1998’, so what we need to plot here are the two columns of numbers – change {data} to read 1999,1998 and press Enter to see how it looks:

I have flipped back to the data tab, so that the correspondence between the numbers and the bars is clear. Each row makes a group of bars, and there are as many bars in each group as you have columns in your data-sheet. You can also choose to stack the bars or draw the chart horizontally – try some of the possibilities by clicking the ‘...’ button in the Barchart style field and seeing what effect the various options have.

Clearly we should use the first column of the data-table as the X-axis labels, so flip back to the Chart tab and enter ‘Supplier’ in the X-labels field (if you forget your column-names, just use the ‘...’ button or press Ctrl+Enter to choose from a list):

This is definitely looking promising – but we should sort out the bar spacing and the remaining headings before we have something to be proud of!

Continue to: Axes, Colours and Headings