The Stacked Bar Chart

A one-page stacked bar chart that takes several categories — months, quarters, teams, people — and draws each as one horizontal bar broken into coloured segments, one per named series, so you compare not just the totals but the make-up behind them. In share mode every bar fills the width and the segments show each series' slice of the whole, which is the cleanest way to see a mix shift — rent creeping up as a share of the budget, one product taking a bigger cut of revenue, meetings eating more of the week. In value mode the bars scale to the largest total instead, so length shows magnitude and the segments still show the split, giving you size and mix in one picture. It beats a table of numbers because the eye adds and divides for you: a fat coloured block is an obvious chunk, a sliver is an obvious minority, and a colour that grows bar over bar tells the story at a glance. The series are named and colour-coded through a shared legend, each wide segment carries its own value or share, and the row total trails each bar. Use it for a budget by expense type across months, revenue by product line across quarters, where your time goes by activity across the week, headcount by team across departments, a survey's answers by option across groups, or any parts-of-a-whole you want to compare across categories. Name your series once, then list a category and its values per line, and the bars, colours and labels draw themselves; leave it blank to print empty tracks and shade them in by hand.

• Landscape
• 1 page
• Tracking

Best for: Comparing the make-up of several categories at once — a budget by expense across months, revenue by product across quarters, where the week goes by activity — as bars split into colour-coded series, in share or absolute mode.