Sounds good, but you’ve lost any correlation between the large and small values. Especially in a bar chart, where the length of bars is important to comprehension, not some mathematical abstraction of length.Īnother suggestion is to “break” the axis, so that part of the axis shows the small values, then another part of the axis shows the large values, with a section of the axis scale removed. For the general public, and for general data, this may not be so useful. For scientific data presented to scientific audiences, this is often an excellent suggestion. One suggestion is to use a logarithmic scale. Usually they ask because a few very large values (for instance, Paris in June or Madrid in May in the chart below) overwhelm the other, relatively much smaller, values.
People frequently ask how to show vastly different values in a single chart. Instead you’ll read why breaking an axis is a bad idea, and you’ll get a tutorial in Panel Charts, which are a more effective (and easier) means to show your data. If you’re looking for a tutorial on breaking an axis scale, you won’t find it here.
