I cannot stand a stacked bar chart for one simple reason. The stacked bar chart has only one common baseline. Thus you can only compare variables along that one common baseline. The rest of the variables do nothing except to clutter up the chart.

I have wanted to do a post against stacked bar charts and to suggest alternatives. Jon Peltier has beaten me to the punch, and has done a much better, and much more thorough job than I would have done. My favorite alternative was the panel column chart with series labels, while his favorite is the panel vendor bar chart. Really, I would call his favorite a bar chart matrix.

Take a look at his article to learn other alternative approaches.

This chart has another issue. The percentage items do not sum to 100%, so it is harder to understand what this tells us. 260% of Tableau users perform these eight tasks? What does that mean? It’s reminiscent of last December’s infamous Fox News pie chart.

I decided to examine some alternative charting approaches.

via Stacked Bar Chart Alternatives » Peltier Tech Blog.

Hat Tip to ChartPorn, which is where I found the reference to the article.