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bar family
bar-vertical
Vertical bars compared across categories on a shared baseline.
The workhorse comparison chart. Each bar's height encodes one value; the eye reads the difference between heights as the difference between magnitudes. Vertical works best when category labels are short or when the x-axis carries time.
When to use
Comparing 4–12 categories with similar value ranges, or showing a short time-series where each year/quarter is a discrete bucket.
When NOT to use
Category names are long (use bar-horizontal), bars are cumulative (use waterfall), or you have 30+ values where the shape is the story (use line).
Rhetorical roles
- compare
- rank
- evolve
Variants & related
Required primitives
- has_axis_titles
- has_data_labels OR has_gridlines
Optional primitives
- has_title
- has_legend
- has_source_note
Common anti-patterns
- truncated-axis
- 3d-distortion
- rainbow-palette
- too-many-bars
Disambiguation rules
- All bars share the same baseline (the y=0 line). If they don't, see waterfall.
- Vertical orientation when category labels fit horizontally beneath each bar.
- For 2+ series per category, see bar-grouped or bar-stacked-vertical.