How to create a grouped bar chart
The bar chart is probably the most all-rounder chart type out there. But often, you don't want to show just one value for a category (e.g. "number of cooks"), but split it up – e.g. by gender, location, or department. The grouped bar chart is great for doing so. It's the slightly less intuitive but more responsive sibling of the grouped column chart: A grouped bar chart can handle lots of categories, even when the chart width is limited.
This article explains how to create a grouped bar chart in Datawrapper. We'll use the chart above as an example.
👉 To learn how to group bars in bar chart, split bar charts, stacked bar charts, dot plots, range plots, and arrow plots, visit this Academy article.
👉 If you want to create a simple bar chart in Datawrapper, please read How to create a bar chart.
Preparing your data
Your data needs to be in a certain format for Datawrapper to create a grouped bar chart:
- Descriptive labels in the first row. They will determine the labels in your color key. In our case, these are the genders.
- Descriptive labels in the first column. They will determine the labels in front of your bars. In our case, these are the occupations.
- At least two numeric columns. These values need to be numeric in order to determine the length of each corresponding bar. In our case, the values are number of people with a certain occupation. (If you upload just one numeric column, you'll get a simple bar chart, now a grouped one.)
Here's how that looks like for the chart above:
| Occupation | Men | Women |
| Chefs and head cooks | 379,776 | 136,224 |
| Cooks | 1,181,737 | 917,263 |
| Food preparation workers | 401,760 | 528,240 |
| Bartenders | 184,896 | 247,104 |
| Fast food workers | 328,937 | 630,063 |
| Waiters and waitresses | 529,708 | 1,224,292 |
- These columns don't need to be in this exact order. Datawrapper will use the column with the numeric values for the bar lengths – no matter if it's the first, second or third column.
- The rows don't need to be in the exact order. You can sort them later.
Uploading your data
You got your data? Neat! Let's get it into Datawrapper. To do so, create a new chart (e.g. by going here.) Now paste your data from e.g. Excel or Google Spreadsheet into the big text field on the right:
There are other ways to get your data into Datawrapper, too. Here's an overview.
Once you're done, click on step 2: Check & Describe.
Check & Describe
In the second step, you can check if your dataset was imported correctly. Datawrapper tries to automatically interpret your column types (text, number, dates), but you can make changes, if necessary.
By selecting the correct output locale, Datawrapper chooses the correct decimal and thousand separators for you.
Click on Proceed to get to step 3: Visualize.
Visualize
In the Visualize step you have four tabs: Chart Type, Refine, Annotate and Layout. Select Grouped Bars to see your data visualized as a grouped bar chart:
Congratulations, you just created your first grouped bar chart! The next step is to refine and annotate your chart. We cover this in the following article: Customizing your grouped bar chart.