Customizing your grouped column chart

This guide will walk you through the steps necessary to customize a grouped column chart as seen below. We assume that you have already uploaded your dataset into Datawrapper. This chart type helps to display related data or groups of related data, for example, revenue vs. profit. Ideally, the "grouped" display reveals a clear and easy-to-understand pattern for the user. 

After you've selected " Grouped Column Chart" and while you're still in the tab "Chart type", you might notice that the chart doesn't look anything like in the screenshot above. To change that, try to click on "transpose this data" below the chart type selection, or visit the first part of this tutorial "How to create a grouped column chart" to understand how your data needs to be structured for this chart type.

Once your chart looks similar to the one above, we can start to change its appearance. We will go through three tabs in step 3: Visualize to do so: "Refine", "Annotate" & "Design". 

1

Refine

After clicking on the "Refine" tab, you have different features available under each axis to customize the appearance of these axes.

Vertical Axis

For the vertical axis, you can modify:

  • custom range: allows you to set your own minimum and maximum values. However, please note that the vertical axis of column chart has been set, by default, to start at zero, meaning that you can only modify the maximum value on this axis.
  • show grid lines: depending on whether or not you want to highlight the display of certain values, you can choose to enable or disable this feature
  • show axis labels: with the first setting ''Number format'', you can decide how to show your values. Below are three examples but there are many different formats available and choice of a format ultimately depends on how big or small your values are:
    • Choose the number format "123.4k" if you have big numbers like "1,303,428" that you'd rather want to display as "1.3m"
    • Choose the number format "0.0" if you have very detailed numbers like "0.1922302" that you'd rather want to display as "0.2"
    • Choose the number format "0%" or "0.0%" if you have a number that is a relative number, like in our case. This setting will add a percentage sign. 

Horizontal Axis

For the horizontal axis, you can:

  • sort columns: here you have two settings; sort columns automatically or in reverse order. If you enable the automatic setting, your columns will be arranged in descending order and reversing the order would naturally sort them in ascending order. 
  • rotate labels: this handy little setting allows you to rotate the labels of your individual columns, in case some of the labels are too long to fit together in a horizontal fashion. Here again, you have the choice to set the rotate option on ''auto'', ''always'' or ''never''. 

Appearance

The next option is Appearance. Here you have the option to adjust the colors of your bars. You can click on customize colors to assign each bar its own color. When you click on customize colors, you will have a list of labels displayed, together with a color box, depending on how many values you had. Click on a label (e.g. "net profit in mm.") and then on the color box below "Choose a Color". A small popup will open, and you'll be able to choose a new color for your selected label. You can also Reset all colors (to the right) or select all or none colors below the list of labels.

Below the customize color feature, you have more options: You can 

  • Show the color key above your chart, to let your readers know which bars belong to which category.
  • Show or hide value labels. By default, we only show the value labels on the bars if readers hover over them. Here, you can decide to disable that or to always show the value labels. 
2

Annotate

In the Annotate tab, you're first asked to give your visualization a title, description, notes, source, byline, and an alternative description for screen readers. You can find a detailed explanation of all these Annotate options here.

Highlight elements

In the 2nd panel in the "Annotate" tab, we can emphasize certain variables. To do so, select the element(s) you want to highlight. The rest of the bars will automatically tone down: 

3

Layout

In the Layout tab, you can select an output locale, change the design theme and footer options, and enable social sharing. Find a detailed explanation of all the Layout options here.

4

Publish

In the final step 4: Publish & Embed, you have the option to publish the chart either by sharing the URL or by copying the embed code directly on your website or CMS (recommended). You can also download your chart as a PNG (available to all users regardless of the type of subscription plan they have) or an SVG or PDF (available only to users of Custom and Enterprise plan). For more information on the different pricing plans, click here.

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