Fast and Beautiful bar charts in 5 minutes

If you’ve talked to me once you probably heard that I usually say something like “why do you make charts at Excel if we have other tools which are much better. Like common guys, excel sucks”. And now I’m wondering why not? Maybe I’ve just never given a chance to excel and what if it is the best service for fast visualization. Like, imagine that you need to make a bar chart very fast, send it to someone or have a look in it and totally forget about that. You probably won’t make it at Illustrator, right?

Therefore, below I simply collected the number of Underground stations in different Russian cities and visualized them in different tools. There is no idea in behind this topic, it was just convenient and easily accessible data. I was also interested in the variation in the number of stations.

So, everything I did was opening a link or service, importing the data and choosing a bar chart visualization. And that’s it. No color changes, fonts, and other things. I’ve just added the names of the graphs for better distinction. A minimum of effort and that’s what happens.

First, the blue color. I have read already many times that blue is associated with a business + it also seems to be suitable for everything. So, apparently in most services, it stands as standard. Second, we can see how the design of tools is spreading. For example, Exploratory is made almost as Tableau (I advise, by the way, it is free!). In Data Illustrator, I really broke my head before I realized how to make a bar chart because it was made by analogy with the usual Adobe Illustrator. Therefore, I do not advise you to go there for fast graphs, only if you want to make something really beautiful.

My verdict is that there is nothing faster than Excel. Seriously. You can argue with that as much as you like, but it even names your graph for you. Therefore, if there is such a need for quick and nice visualization, get stuck once and create a chart template which you can use later. Just a good template with a transparent background, right font, matching colors, and other stuff. Just make an effort once to make your future life easier and better.

But! I still really love Datawrapper and Plotly very much, so I use them both very often even for sending charts to other people. Still, Tableau and Exploratory are good, but these are desktop tools – so it’s easier to work with them for creating dashboards. And you know what, Google Sheets are also not bad!