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Column vs Bar Chart in Excel

By Neale Blackwood, CPA posted 30-06-2025 01:53 PM

  

As I was reading the CPA Australia 2024 Annual Report I was interested in the presentation of charts (graphs). A lot of money had been spent on the presentation of the report. There were lots of high-quality photos and other images. I was disappointed with much of the data visualisation.

As a simple example, below is a recreation (as close I could get) of the Total Revenue chart from the bottom of page 118.

column chart example

You can check out the annual report at the link below.

https://www.cpaaustralia.com.au/integrated-report/downloads

I did the CPA Australia Data Interpretation and Visualisation micro course a couple of years back and one thing that was stressed was making the chart easy to read.

The years and values in the above chart are not easy to read.

There is a level of accuracy in the numbers displayed that isn’t required. Instead of rounding to thousands they should be rounded to millions.

The vertical axis seems redundant given that every column has a value.

The changes below didn’t take much effort, but I think the chart below is easier to read and gets the job done.

The charts are the same size.

#Excel

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Comments

01-07-2025 03:46 AM

That's a good observation and proposal.