QuickSight Visuals - Bar Chart Combos

Hello everyone, my name is Duncan. I'm a data engineer with West Loop Strategy, an AWS partner. Today for our series on QuickSight visuals, I'm going to be covering bar chart combos.

Stacked bar chart combos have a lot of visual elements that can make them pretty tricky to use appropriately in your dashboard. But all of those different elements are also what's going to make them a really powerful tool to show your data graphically in your dashboard. So if you haven't yet, I really recommend you watch our previous video on bar charts as a lot of the same concepts are going to apply here.

First and foremost, there are two styles of bar chart combos: stacked and clustered. This is simply how you decide to represent the data. My opinion is, if you have a small grouping, say three main business segments, you're safe to use a cluster bar chart. If you're using more than three, I would consider using a stack bar chart and relying more on the tool tip.

Another small tip here, really try to keep the amount of dimensions to a minimum if possible, or at least keep the scope of your x -axis narrow so that you're really not overcrowding the visual and making it harder to understand the information you're trying to communicate from this visual, right? We don't want to create a scenario where we're trying to display the data graphically, but in the process we overdo it and now the waters are sort of muddied and we don't really understand what's trying to be communicated.

Now the real way to discern the normal bar chart from the bar chart combos is that you're able to include multiple lines that are not static like a reference line and can be calculated fields from your dataset or just regular fields from your dataset.

For example, here I have a bar chart combo that is grouped by business segment and the x-axis shows years from our order date field. For the value field well, we can make it quantity of sales made, so now I can add two lines. One being the total sum of sales and the other being profit. I'm going to make sure to update those to currency in my field well so that it makes sense when we read it. So now what I'm able to show is how many units of my products were sold in each business segment per year and with my lines, what sales and what profit looked like to determine if I have seen growth in my overall business. So you're still able to add the reference lines that we had in the bar chart.

I recommend taking some time to add these data labels into your tooltip to make sure that you're just making sure that you are being diligent with your y-axis. Since you're adding lines, you're going to have the left and the right y-axis. So you're going to need to make sure that those values make sense for your reader while they're looking at it. And this is where going into the format visual menu and going and making sure that you are titling them appropriately.

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