How to pimp adjacent bars

January 2019

I stumbled on a piece on Stephanie Evergreen's blog about switching adjacent bars for overlapping bars to aid readability. See: My New Favourite Graph Type

And wow is she right. We've started using them everywhere.

Adjacent bars force your eyes to leap from stack to stack, so I made this little animation showing how much clearer the overlapping style can be.

Overlapping bars are also easy to use. Here's how to create them in Excel, Tableau and Power BI.