Introducing column charts

Column charts are the most common type of charts. They have categories organized horizontally on the x axis (for example, time) and data is placed vertically on the y axis. They are useful for illustrating the difference between the data of each category.

Consider the London Olympics 2012 medal table, in which the top five countries are as follows:

Rank	Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
1	United States	46	29	29	104
2	China	38	27	23	88
3	Great Britain	29	17	19	65
4	Russian Federation	24	26	32	82
5	South Korea	13	8	7	28

The preceding list shows the gold, silver, and bronze medals won by the top five countries. The last column shows the total number of medals won by the respective country. We will plot this data into a column chart for a more meaningful visualization:

1. Create a new blank HTML file that includes the jQuery and highcharts.js scripts. You can also copy the HTML code from the example in the previous chapter. Note that the...