5 UNDERRATED CHART TYPES THAT BETTER EXPLAIN YOUR DATA

While bar, line, and pie charts are Excel's workhorses, sometimes they don't fully capture the nuances or specific relationships within your data. Excel offers a wealth of other chart types that, though less common, can be incredibly effective at telling a clearer, more impactful story. Exploring these can elevate your data visualizations beyond the ordinary.

5 Underrated Chart Types That Better Explain Your Data

Here are five underrated chart types that better explain your data.

• Waterfall Chart: Visualizing Incremental Changes

  A Waterfall chart shows how an initial value is affected by a series of positive or negative incremental changes. It's excellent for illustrating financial statements, demonstrating profit and loss, or showing how a total has been built up or broken down.

  Why it's great: Clearly shows the contribution of each component to a final value, making it easy to see where changes originate.

  
  

• Pareto Chart: Identifying Key Contributors (80/20 Rule)

  A Pareto chart combines a bar chart (showing individual values in descending order) and a line chart (showing cumulative totals). It's ideal for identifying the most significant factors in a dataset, based on the 80/20 rule (e.g., 80% of problems come from 20% of causes).

  Why it's great: Quickly highlights the vital few contributors versus the trivial many, helping prioritize efforts in quality control, sales, or issue resolution.

  
  

• Box & Whisker Chart: Understanding Data Distribution

  A Box & Whisker chart (or Box Plot) displays the distribution of a dataset by showing its quartiles (25th, 50th/median, 75th percentile) and outliers. It's perfect for comparing distributions across different categories, revealing skewness, and identifying unusual data points.

  Why it's great: Provides a compact visual summary of data spread, central tendency, and extreme values, which is much more informative than just an average.

  
  

• Sunburst Chart: Hierarchical Data Visualization

  A Sunburst chart is excellent for visualizing hierarchical data, showing how inner rings relate to outer rings. Each level of the hierarchy is represented by a ring or circle, with the innermost circle at the top of the hierarchy.

  Why it's great: Effectively illustrates the breakdown of a total into its constituent parts across multiple levels, useful for organizational structures, product categories, or regional sales data.

  
  

• Treemap Chart: Proportional Data with Hierarchy

  Similar to a Sunburst, a Treemap chart displays hierarchical data as a set of nested rectangles. The size of each rectangle represents its value relative to the total, and colors can be used to distinguish categories.

  Why it's great: Excellent for showing proportions within a hierarchy when you have many categories. It makes efficient use of space and allows for quick comparison of sizes across different levels.

  
  

Don't limit your storytelling to the usual suspects. By incorporating these underrated chart types, you can create more insightful, precise, and visually compelling reports that truly explain your data.