This article is adapted from an edition of our Off the Charts newsletter originally published in October 2021. Off the Charts is a weekly, subscriber-only guide to The Economist’s award-winning data ...

Bar charts are too frequently used to communicate data that they cannot represent well. We strongly encourage the use of more appropriate plots to display statistical samples. Bar charts are a simple ...

The classic horizontal bar chart is something we’re all familiar with. For many of us, it was the first ‘chart’ we learnt in school, usually alongside Venn diagrams and line graphs. That’s because bar ...