The characteristics of excel charts are differentiated on the basis of the graphs.

1, bar chart is the most common type of chart, it is applicable to the occasion is a two-dimensional data set (each data point includes two values, i.e., X and Y), but there is only one dimension to be compared.

In general, bar charts are used to show changes in data over a period of time, i.e., the X-axis of a bar chart is time-dimensional, and the user habitually assumes that there is a temporal trend (but showing a trend is not the point of a bar chart).

When encountering a situation where the X-axis is not time-dimensional, such as the need for a bar chart to describe the comparison between the various items, it is recommended that each bar be differentiated by color to change the user's focus on the time trend. The following figure shows a display of 7 different categories of data.

2, line graph is also a common type of chart, it is the same data series of data points on the chart with a straight line connected to show the trend of the data at equal intervals, as shown in the figure below. Line charts are suitable for two-dimensional large data sets, especially those occasions where trends are more important than individual data points.

A line chart can display continuous data over time (according to common scale settings), and it emphasizes the temporal nature of the data and the rate of change, so it is well suited to displaying the trend of the data over equal time intervals.

In a line chart, category data is evenly distributed along the horizontal axis and all value data is evenly distributed along the vertical axis. Line charts are also suitable for the comparison of multiple two-dimensional data sets, as shown in the following figure for the comparison of sales of two products at the same time.

3, pie charts are also commonly used chart types, but in practice should try to avoid the use of pie charts, because the naked eye is not sensitive to the size of the area. For example, for the same set of data using pie charts and bar charts to display.

In general, always apply a bar chart instead of a pie chart. There is an exception to this rule, which is to reflect the proportion of a section to the whole, and if you want to know the proportion of sales of each product, you can use a pie chart.

4, bar charts are used to show the difference in data between the various items, it has the same performance purposes with the bar chart, the difference is: bar charts are in the horizontal direction to show the data in turn, bar charts are in the vertical direction to show the data in turn, as shown in the figure below.

Bar charts depict the differences between individual items. Categorical items are represented vertically and numerical values are represented horizontally. This highlights comparisons of values and downplays changes over time. Bar charts should often be used for charts where the axis labels are too long to avoid the omission of long categorical labels in bar charts, as shown below.

5, area charts and line graphs are similar, can also show multiple data series, only the connecting line with the classification between the axes filled with patterns, mainly used to show the trend of data.

But the difference is: line graphs can only purely reflect the trend of each sample, such as the trend of each month of a product; and area charts in addition to reflecting the trend of each sample, you can also show the trend of the overall data, that is, the area, as shown in the figure below.