Bar Graph Maker

A free bar graph maker that works in your browser

This bar graph maker turns a small table of numbers into a clean, labelled chart in seconds. Type your categories and values, or paste cells straight from Excel or Google Sheets, and the graph redraws as you type. It is built for school projects, reports, presentations and quick comparisons: favourite subjects in a class survey, monthly sales, marks in each test, rainfall by month.

Choose columns or horizontal bars, put several series side by side, stack them, or stack them to 100%. Add a title and axis names, switch on value labels, pick a colour-blind-safe palette, then download a sharp PNG, an editable SVG, a vector PDF on A4 or Letter, or print it. Everything happens on your device; your numbers are never uploaded.

How to use the Bar Graph Maker

1. Edit the example table, or press Start blank. Each row is a category (a bar or a group of bars); each column is a series.
2. Paste from a spreadsheet into any cell, or open Paste or open a CSV and drop in comma, tab or semicolon separated text. A first row of names becomes the series names.
3. Write the chart title and the two axis titles, then choose Vertical columns or Horizontal bars.
4. With two or more series pick Grouped, Stacked or Stacked to 100%. Sort the categories if you want a ranking.
5. Download the PNG for a document or slide, the PDF for printing, or the SVG to edit in a drawing program. “Data as CSV” saves the table itself.

Bar Graph Maker features

How the axis and the bars are worked out

Bars always start from zero, because the length of a bar is the number it stands for; a bar graph that starts at 50 makes a value of 60 look twice as large as 55. The tool finds the smallest and largest value (for stacked bars, the largest stack), then picks a “nice” step of 1, 2 or 5 times a power of ten so the gridlines land on round numbers. You can override the start and end of the axis, but doing so can exaggerate differences, so use it carefully.

In a grouped graph each category gets an equal slot and the series share it equally; the gap between bars slider controls how much of the slot is left empty. In a 100% graph each bar is divided by that category’s total, so tall and short categories become comparable shares. Blank cells are simply skipped, and a cell that is not a number is highlighted and left out.

When to use a bar graph (and when not to)

Use a bar graph to compare separate categories, such as sports, towns or months treated as labels. If the horizontal axis is continuous (time or measurement) a line graph shows the trend better, and if you want to show parts of one whole a pie chart is the usual choice, although a sorted horizontal bar graph is often easier to read when there are more than five parts.

• Keep category names short; long names wrap onto up to three lines under the columns, or sit on the left in horizontal mode.
• Sort by size (largest first) for rankings, keep the original order for time-like categories such as Jan to Dec.
• Use at most four or five series in a grouped graph; more than that is easier to read as separate small graphs.
• Tick Show value labels when the exact number matters and the chart will be printed; leave them off when the shape is the message.