Create your Bar Chart in seconds

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Visualize amounts with respect to one categorical variable

Bar Chart example: College admission:
How important are each of these factors?

Bar Chart example: Higher quality and lower prices rise China's retail import market incessantly

Bar Chart example: IIT Bombay catapults itself into the
illustrious circle of world-class institutions

Bar Chart example: Jobs at estimated high risk of automation

Bar Chart example: Star Wars Global Box Office

Create Bar Chart Learn more

Create your chart in 3 simple steps

Create new Bar Chart
Add your data
Export or share

Why Vizzlo?

Create professional charts in seconds
Fully customizable, no design skills needed
Create directly in PowerPoint & Google Slides

What is a bar graph?

A bar chart is a common graphical display when you want to show quantitative values for a set of categories. The bars represent a set of numerical data points. The length of the bars is proportional to the numerical values associated with each category. The bars can be placed either vertically or horizontally. It is best practice to make the bars start at zero. Otherwise, you run the risk that your chart misleads people.

This type of chart is also known as a bar chart, bar plot, or column chart.

A brief history of the bar chart

The first known bar chart was part of Wiliam Playfair’s The Commercial and Political Atlas, from 1796. The author, a Scottish political economist and a pioneer in data visualization and graphic design, compared year-to-year data of different branches of trade.

How to make a bar chart with Vizzlo

Enter your data either open the “Spreadsheet” in the menu bar and copy&paste your data into the corresponding fields or upload as XSLX or CSV file
change the data of the default entries - just click on any bar and use the input elements in the sidebar
Add additional bars by clicking the “plus” buttons on each side of a bar. Alternatively, click on “+ Add bar” in the menu bar
Explore additional customization options the sidebar
Click on Analysis to add a shade or a projection line

Bar graph pro tips

Bar charts should generally include a zero baseline.
If the labels to identify the bars take up too much horizontal space, swap the x and y-axis.
Always sort your bars if the categorical variable has no natural order.

Bar graph: use case

Almost anything!
Sales volume of different brands
Total number of people living in different cities
The difference in life expectancy between countries or regions

Bar chart: key features

Take advantage of our advanced Analysis functions to visualize growth, trends, projections and benchmarks
Vertical and horizontal views
Sorting bars ascending or descending
Change bar colors
Adjust bar width
Customize axes lines and grid lines
Adjustable minimum and maximum range for y-axis
Analysis lines: growth rates (CAGR), reference lines, trend lines, and benchmarks
Show values and change their number format

Resources

Step-by-step tutorial
Vizzlo’s Data Viz Guide includes:

Bar Chart: What's new?

Jul 2, 2026

Introducing callouts: eye-catching annotations that attach to individual data points and stay connected as your chart changes. Callouts are available in bar charts to start, with more chart types coming soon.

Bar chart with a speech-bubble callout attached to a data point in Vizzlo.

Dec 18, 2025

Values can now be displayed inside the bars of bar charts.

Image of a bar chart with values inside the bars.

Jul 24, 2025

Top arrows now respect sum value positioning again.

Jul 3, 2025

It is now possible to seamlessly switch between grouped and stacked series—no need to convert into a different chart type anymore.

Feb 18, 2025

A single click on a bar now selects the series and shows the series settings in the sidebar. Individual bar colors can be set by using a right-click on a bar and choosing the option “Change individual bar color” in the context menu.