Bar charts are one of the most useful and versatile visualization types in Spotfire. Let's go over them here:
- Good for visualizing: Any type of data that is split into categories. Examples of categories include the following:
- Product category
- Sales region
- Car make and model
- Don't use for: Generally, visualizing continuous data on the x-axis is not recommended (as you will see in the following example), unless you are interested in the general shape or trend of the data.
- Pros: Really easy to construct, configure, and interpret.
- Cons: If you have lots and lots of categories, there simply isn't enough space on the categorical axis to show all the labels, so you will need to use techniques such as zoom sliders and hierarchical axis selectors. See Chapter 8, The World is Your Visualization, for more information on constructing hierarchies from axis selectors...
