Bar graph maker

The same data can be drawn four ways, and the right one depends on what the reader should compare.

Vertical bars (column chart)

Choose Upright for short labels that follow an order, such as months, years or school years. Readers compare heights against the axis on the left.

Horizontal bars

Choose Sideways when labels are long (“Customer service”, “Website refresh”) or when there are more than about ten categories. The labels sit on one line each instead of being squeezed under the bars.

Double (grouped) bar graph

With two or more series, such as Year 7 and Year 8, Side by side puts their bars next to each other within each category, so you can compare the groups directly. This is what teachers and textbooks call a double bar graph.

Segmented (stacked) bar graph

Stacked piles the series into one bar per category, with the total printed on top. It shows both the whole and its parts; turn on Show as shares of 100% under More options when the split matters more than the size, as in the Project hours template.

Select the cells in your spreadsheet, header row included, copy them, and use Paste data. Tab-separated text from Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers is read directly, as are CSV, TSV and .xlsx files through Open a file.

• Thousands separators, currency symbols, % signs and words like k, M and bn are understood, so “£1.2M” is read as 1,200,000.
• If a cell isn’t a number, the Data step says which row and column, in plain English.
• A two-column list (Fruit, Sales) becomes one bar per item, each in its own colour; more columns become grouped series.

If your table runs the other way, with the categories across the top, switch How the table is read under Layout. The Excel and Google Sheets guide covers both apps in more detail.

The value axis starts at zero, as a bar graph’s should, and its gridlines land on round numbers. Negative values grow down from the zero line. Set a prefix such as £ or a suffix such as % under Style → More options → Numbers, and choose how many decimals to show.

Eight looks and nine colour palettes are built in, including two checked for colour blindness. Every bar carries its label, so colour is never the only way to tell series apart, and the legend appears automatically when there are several series.

Image (PNG) saves the finished graph at 1920×1080 for a 16:9 slide, 1080×1080 for a square post or 1080×1350 for a 4:5 post, or at twice that with Sharp (2×) for print. Turn on Transparent background in Style to lay the graph over your own design. Copy image puts it straight on the clipboard, ready to paste into a document, slide or chat.

Vector image (SVG) keeps every bar and letter as shapes, so it stays crisp at any size and can be recoloured in Inkscape, Illustrator or Figma. And because the graph is drawn by the same engine as the videos, Video (MP4) or GIF turns it into a short clip of the bars growing, which tends to hold attention on a slide or a feed far better than a still.

A bar graph compares separate categories (sports, products, countries), so its bars have gaps and could be put in any order. A histogram shows how one measurement is spread out, so its bars are ranges of numbers (0–9, 10–19, 20–29) that touch and must stay in order.

This maker doesn’t count raw measurements into ranges for you. If you already have the counts, paste the ranges as labels and the counts as values, and you get a histogram-style graph; make sure the ranges are equal in width so the bar heights stay comparable.