Where is my tool bar?

What chart tool allows a progressive bar chart where the width of each bar represents a value on a scale?

  • Some professional reports (e.g. McKinsey) show graphs where the Y axis is represented by the height of a bar and the X axis is continuous and bars are stacked side by side and their width represents a value. What charting tool allows for such unorthodox graph?

  • Answer:

    Side-by-side bars of variable-width is fairly easy to do in R, using ggplot. I recently adapted http://www.r-bloggers.com/simple-marimekkomosaic-plots/ [1]. your case is far simpler: you only need variable-width, not stacked heights scaled for area. And you're not colorizing by a third variable either. And here you just order the rectangles by increasing height (Avg cost savings). More than half the work here is going to be in that label placement and arrow drawing. [1] By comparison, the marimekko is more complicated, and only 1 page of code.

Stephen McInerney at Quora Visit the source

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Other answers

It looks like there is a "hack" to do this in Excel: http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/variable-width-column-charts/. At the end of this blog post he describes an Excel Add-In that would do this automatically; I haven't tried it myself.

Heather Deacon

I haven't seen a single one, likely because this is so close to the more often used treemap.

James Lytle

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