Creating bar plots, histograms, and row plots

In the last section, we customized a line plot. While we were customizing it, we saw that we could have easily changed it to a bar or area plot, without sacrificing much of the visualization's fidelity. This is because the three types of plots – line, bar, and area – are all very similar and share code architecture. They all put one dimension on the X axis and one or more dimensions on the Y axis. The most common dimension on the X axis for line and area plots is a time-based dimension, such as a date. That's not always the case for bar plots. Let's learn about them, and what kind of data works best for them. We'll also learn about row plots, which are simply just bar plots rotated 90 degrees.

When to use bar plots

You can always use a bar plot instead of a line plot. However, when you have a lot of data points on your X axis, it will result in a lot of bars. To see what I mean, try changing the...