Bubble Charts: A Non-Messy Alternative to Bar Plot

Bar plots quickly get messy and cluttered as the number of categories increases.

A bubble plot is often a better alternative in such cases.

They are like scatter plots but:

• with one categorical axis

• and one continuous axis

Compared to a bar plot, they are less cluttered and offer much better comprehension.

This is also evident from the image above.

It is difficult to interpret the bar plot because it has too many bars packed into a small space:

For instance, by looking at the bar plot above, it is almost impossible to tell which countries did no exports and in which year.

But now look at the bubble chart:

The size-encoded bubbles make it totally effortless to find countries and their year of no exports.

I created the above chart using Plotly: Notebook.

Isn’t that cool?

👉 Over to you: What are some other better alternatives to bar plots and when to use them?

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