Graphs will always be a part of our lives.

From our primary education years, during our college, until now, in our workplace, we bump into them.

Graphs or “Charts” are popular ways of providing diagrams to certain data sets. Charts are used to make it easier for people to understand the relationship between different data sets and large quantities of data. Since they are easier to understand and can be read more quickly than textual data, Charts are popular among newspapers, advertisements, and/or books. Charts are also easy to make – they can be created by hand or by a computer program.

graph and chart collection

There are, more or less, ten ways to create Graphs, some of them are more effective in presenting information than others, given a certain factor/circumstance. For example, the Pie Chart is much more appropriate if the given data show percentages of certain variable groups (like those from “agree, disagree, and neutral” surveys). Banks, on the other hand, use Line Charts, since their data usually represent numbers that change over a period of time (such as annual revenues).

The most common types of Charts include the Histogram, Bar Chart (uses bars to show frequencies and values), Line Chart (a two-dimensional scatter plot), Pie Chart (percentage values are presented as pie slices), and Timeline.

Other lesser-known types of Charts include the Box-and-whiskers plot, Bubble plot (a scatterplot that shows a third variable), Doughnut Chart (more or less the same as pie Chart), Polar area diagram (enhanced form of pie Chart), Radar Chart (a scatterplot with three or more variables), and Waterfall Chart (a special type of floating-column Chart).