Bar graphs to show numbers that are independent of each other. Example, data might include things like the number of people who preferred each of Chinese takeaways, Indian takeaways and fish and chips.
A histogram is a specific type of bar chart, where the categories are ranges of numbers. Histograms therefore show combined continuous data.
Pie charts to show you how a whole is divided into different parts. You might, for example, want to show how a budget had been spent on different items in a particular year.
Line graphs to show you how numbers have changed over time. They are used when you have data that are connected, and to show trends, for example, average night time temperature in each month of the year.
Area chart: an area chart is a line chart with the areas below the lines filled with colors. Use a stacked area chart to display the contribution of each value to a total over time.
Cartesian graphs have numbers on both axes, which therefore allow you to show how changes in one thing affect another. These are widely used in mathematics, and particularly in Algebra. Some more chart types:
Scatter plot: scatter plots are used to plot data points on a horizontal and a vertical axis in the attempt to show how much one variable is affected by another
Bubble chart: a bubble chart is a variation of a scatter chart in which the data points are replaced with bubbles, and an additional dimension of the data is represented in the size of the bubbles.
Water fall chart: a waterfall chart is an ideal way to visualize a starting value, the positive and negative changes made to that value, and the resulting end value. Axes Graphs have two axes, the lines that run across the bottom and up the side. The line along the bottom is called the horizontal or x-axis, and the line up the side is called the vertical or y-axis.
The x-axis may contain categories or numbers. You read it from the bottom left of the graph.
The y-axis usually contains numbers, again starting from the bottom left of the graph.
