Customizing your grouped bar chart

After uploading your data and selecting the chart type Grouped bars, it's time to make some changes to the appearance of your chart. This article covers all the available options.

Contents

1. Refine: Labels
2. Refine: Horizontal axis
3. Refine: Appearance
4. Refine: Sorting & Grouping
5. Annotate: Title, description, source, etc
6. Annotate: Highlight elements
7. Annotate: Text annotations
8. Annotate: Highlight range
9. Layout & Publish

When you are in step 3: Visualize, you'll see four tabs: Chart type, Refine, Annotate, and Design. In the Refine tab are five sections: Labels, Horizontal axis, Appearance, Sorting & Grouping. Let's start with Labels:

Refine: Labels

Here we have the following options:

• Alignment: Decide if your category labels are left-aligned or right-aligned.
• Move labels to separate line: If you choose to turn this one, then instead of being in front of your bars, the category labels sit on top of the bars and the whole chart becomes taller. This is a good choice for a chart with long labels, because they get more space (= the complete width of your chart).
• Show values: In most charts, your audience should be able to see the underlying values of each bar, so your chart will show the values by default. You can choose the Visibility (if the values are visible all the time or only when a reader hovers over a bar), Value alignment (if the values should sit left-aligned or right-aligned in each bar) and the Number format of the values. Learn more about available number formats and when to choose which one here.
• Replace country codes with flags: That's a great choice if your category labels include mentions of countries. Learn more here.
• Show color legend: A color legend helps to make your readers make sense of your bars, so this is turned on by default. Only turn it off if you explain the bars (and their colors) sufficiently e.g. with annotations. If you choose to Stack labels, the color legend items show up below each other instead of next to each other.

Refine: Horizontal axis

The next panel lets us customize your x-axis.

First, with Custom range, you can decide which value range your x-axis should cover. By default, the x-axis for each column will be as long as your biggest bar. But if our chart shows percentages close to 100%, it makes sense to extend the chart to 100%. Readers will then be able to see how much is "missing" to achieve the ideal 100%. So we can write in a "100" in the "max"-field.

You'll also find the option to turn on Grid lines.

Datawrapper will try to set grid lines that make sense, but you can also customize them. For example, if you type in "500000, 1000000", your grid lines show up like this:

Besides that, you can choose the grid position (above the chart, the default; or below the chart), and can change the number format here, too.

Refine: Appearance

In the third panel in the tab Refine, we can decide the design of our bar chart: We can choose the colors of our bars and decide if we want to make our bars thicker, separate each category with a line, or give each bar a grey background.

Let's focus on how to choose colors for our bars. After clicking on Customize colors, you'll get the option to set a color for each of your bars in one category. Select an element to change its colors by clicking on the color swatch:

Refine: Sorting & Grouping

In the fourth and last panel, we can decide how to sort the order of your bars and labels and decide how you want to group them.

• Sort bars: You can keep the order of your spreadsheet by leaving this option unselected. If you select this option, you can choose the column you want to sort the bars by.
• Reverse order: If you select this option, you will have the largest bars at the bottom.
• Groups: You can upload an extra column to put categories into extra groups. In our case, we could have a column that states for each social network if it's been around "before 2010" or "after 2010". If we choose that column as our "Groups", the chart would make a separation between the bars showing the "old" social networks and the younger ones. Learn more about grouping bars here.

And that's all for the Refine tab! Let's continue with the Annotate tab.

Annotate: Title, description, source, etc

In the Annotate tab, you're first asked to give your visualization a title, description, notes, source, byline, and an alternative description for screen readers. You can find a detailed explanation of all these Annotate options here.

Annotate: Highlight elements

In the 2nd panel in the "Annotate" tab, you can choose to highlight elements: The label in front of these bars will appear in bold, and the bars of the unselected categories will fade into the background. You can revert the highlight by clicking on the x in front of the label:

Annotate: Text annotations

You can add annotations to your split bar bar chart by clicking on Add text annotation. You can then style and move the text, add an arrow and circle to it, and adjust how it will appear on mobile. Here's an in-depth explanation of all the options.

Annotate: Highlight range

You can add a range or line highlight by clicking on Add range highlight and then dragging on the chart where you want the highlight to be. You can then change its position, color, opacity, and line width and style, or delete it again. Here's an in-depth explanation of all the options.

Layout & Publish

In the Layout tab, you can select an output locale, change the design theme and footer options, and enable social sharing. Find a detailed explanation of all the Layout options here.

In the final step 4: Publish & Embed, you have the option to publish the chart either by sharing the URL or by copying the embed code directly on your website or CMS (recommended). You can also download your chart as a PNG (available to all users regardless of the type of subscription plan they have) or as an SVG or PDF (available only to users of Custom and Enterprise plan). For more information on the different pricing plans, click here.