Section 6.3 What is the Right Chart Type?
One of the things that we will see in a moment, is that Excel has a plethora of chart options.
Unless you are using other charts for very compelling and good reasons there are likely only two types of charts that you should ever use:
The Scatter Plot
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Use when plotting raw experimental data.
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Useful for showing trends and creating mathematical models.
The Column Chart
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Use when comparing averaged (or other statistical manipulations) data.
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Useful for comparing values.
There are some cases where using other types of plots is acceptable. Some of your professors may even sneak in a pie chart to describe a very high level concept at the beginning or end of a lecture. There are other fields such as the social sciences where stacked bar plots or "box and whisker" plots are common, although these are just fancy column and scatter plots, respectively. The main takeaway on scatter and column plots is that they are the most useful for quickly and effectively communicating large quantities of data points in a way that is meant to facilitate discussion with peers and hold up to scientific query during the peer review process. This is especially important in science and engineering fields!
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