Bubble Charts vs Bar Plots

A step towards simplifying common data visualizations.

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

For instance, consider the bar chart below, which depicts the exports of various countries across several years:

It is so difficult to interpret this plot because it has too many bars packed into a small space.

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

A bubble plot is often a better alternative in such cases, as depicted below:

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

Firstly, the size-encoded bubbles drastically reduce the clutter, which we noticed earlier (shown above).

Next, it also makes finding countries and their year of no exports effortless.

Isn’t that cool?

You can download the code for this article here: Bubble Chart Notebook.

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

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