They say a picture paints a thousand words and this is never truer than when it comes to the presentation of data. The human brain does not easily absorb large sets of numbers, so if you want to really communicate with people it makes sense to use tools such as Run Charts, Process Behaviour Charts, and Bar Charts.

The purpose of a Bar Chart is to compare values or amounts across different categories. It consists of a simple two-dimensional plot where one dimension consists of a list of categories and the other dimension consists of frequencies or amounts for some measure. A bar is drawn for each category where the length of the bar represents the value of the measure for that category. The lengths of the bars make comparisons between the categories.

A check sheet used to gather data on the causes of accidents would look something like this:

Published 1st January 1970