How to create Bar Chart Race

Ercan Vural
2 min readApr 28, 2019

Why?

  • Recently it is very popular to show data with bar chart race. Here you can see the example:
  • It is very useful because you can easily observe changes in ranks by the time. When you look at just a table with that kind of a cumulative data, you can not easily understand position of parameters in a specific time.
  • This visualisation also shows how was numbers are increasing or decreasing for specific parameter.

How?

  • I spent my most of the time while trying to figure out name of it. Once I did it, google directed me to the website below:

https://app.flourish.studio

  • Once you sign up, you can see many types of visualisation templates from the page below:
  • When you scroll down, you will see the Bar Chart Race, and when you click it you will see the page below. It starts with an example already.
  • All you need to do is to click on data part from top, and upload convenient data file there. Or you can edit cells manually.
  • At the right top part, you are able to define cells in 4 groups. But if you do not have a category and image part, you can just leave them empty.
  • There should be the list of paramters in the first column, and other each column must belong to each unit of time.
  • Data in the columns must be cumulative. Data at any time unit, should be the sum of data from the previous time periods, so that visaulisation works as a counter by moving bars from left to right
  • In the right side in preview mode, there are many options. You can set speed of animation from animation part. Second value there decides to speed of transition to next time unit.
  • At the labels & images part, you are able to decide size of the time information by entering percentage value. It is just under current time counter.

For another tutorial: https://blog.gramener.com/bar-chart-race-in-powerpoint/

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