Chart guides
Practical answers to the questions people actually search for before making a chart — no theory, no jargon, each with a live example you can edit.
- Histogram vs Bar Chart: What Is the Difference?They look similar and are constantly confused, but they answer completely different questions. Here is the practical difference, plus how to tell which one your data needs.
- When to Use a Pie Chart (and When Not To)Pie charts get a lot of criticism, most of it deserved and most of it avoidable. Follow four rules and they are perfectly good at the one job they do well.
- Scatter Plot vs Line Graph: Which One Should You Use?Both plot points on an XY plane, and the difference comes down to one question: is your x-axis time, or is it another measurement?
- How to Choose Chart ColorsColour is the fastest way to make a chart look professional — and the fastest way to make it unreadable. These are the rules that matter in a business report.
Tools
Every chart maker
- Bar Chart CreatorPaste any two-column list of categories and values. The bar chart renders while you type — no wizard, no configuration, no account.
- Line Graph GeneratorBuilt for time series. Paste dates, years, months or quarters in the first column and any number of value columns after it.
- Histogram BuilderPaste one column of raw numbers. FastChart bins them automatically using Sturges’ rule, and you can override the bin count with a single slider.
- Pie Chart MakerTwo columns are all it takes: a label and a value. Percentages are calculated for you and rendered directly on the slices.
- Donut Chart MakerA donut chart is a pie chart with the centre cut out — perfect for dashboards where the middle holds the headline total.
- Scatter Plot MakerPaste two numeric columns — X first, then Y. FastChart detects that both columns are numeric and switches to a scatter plot automatically.
- Radar Chart MakerAlso called a spider chart. Put the dimension names in the first column and one column per item you want to compare.
- Area Chart MakerAn area chart is a line chart with the region below filled in — good for showing volume over time and cumulative totals.
- Bubble Chart MakerA bubble chart is a scatter plot with a third variable encoded as the area of each point. Paste an X column, a Y column and a size column.
- Stacked Bar Chart MakerA stacked bar chart shows the composition of each total. Every numeric column becomes a segment stacked on top of the previous one.
- Grouped Bar Chart MakerA grouped (clustered) bar chart puts the series side by side so every bar shares the same baseline and stays directly comparable.
- Treemap GeneratorA treemap encodes each value as the area of a rectangle. It handles far more categories than a pie chart without becoming unreadable.
- Funnel Chart MakerA funnel chart shows how many items survive each stage of a process. Paste the stages in order, from widest to narrowest.
- Waterfall Chart MakerA waterfall chart breaks a net change into its parts. Paste a label column and a column of positive and negative changes — the running total is calculated for you.
- Polar Chart MakerA polar (radial bar) chart wraps a bar chart around a circle. It is compact and eye-catching for a modest number of categories.
- Heatmap GeneratorA heatmap shades a grid of values from low to high. Paste a table where the first column labels the rows and every other column is a heatmap column.
- Candlestick Chart MakerA candlestick chart shows the open, high, low and close of each period in a single mark. Paste five columns: a date plus OHLC.
- Box Plot MakerA box and whisker plot summarises a distribution: the box spans the interquartile range, the line is the median, and points beyond the whiskers are outliers.
- Violin Plot MakerA violin plot draws a mirrored density curve for each group, so you can see bimodal and skewed distributions that a box plot would hide.
- Gantt Chart MakerA Gantt chart lays every task on a shared time axis so overlaps and dependencies become obvious. Paste a task name, a start date and an end date.
- Timeline MakerA timeline places events on a single date axis with alternating labels. Paste a date column and a label column — the rows are sorted for you.
- Sunburst Chart MakerA sunburst chart shows a hierarchy as concentric rings — the centre is the root and each ring out is one level deeper.
- Network Graph MakerA network graph draws entities as nodes and relationships as edges. Paste a source column, a target column and an optional weight.
- Sankey Diagram MakerA Sankey diagram shows flow between stages, with band thickness proportional to volume. Paste three columns: source, target and value.
- Chord Diagram MakerA chord diagram arranges entities around a circle and connects them with ribbons whose width shows the volume flowing in each direction.
- Hexbin Plot MakerA hexbin plot solves overplotting: instead of drawing thousands of overlapping dots it bins them into hexagons shaded by density.