Charts communicate ideas with simplicity, clarity, and detail.

Once you're comfortable with D3 you can quickly:

* understand key metrics at a glance
* catch anomalies (before they turn into problems)
* give key insights to your customers
* and impress your boss and co-workers

Today, I will show you the exact methods I use to create beautiful, understandable data visualizations using D3.

The Fullstack D3 masterclass is the complete guide to D3. With dozens of code examples showing each step, you will gain new insights into your data by creating visualizations in this self-paced online course.

Fullstack D3 Masterclass

---
title: "Making a Bar Chart"
description: "Next, we embark on a mission to create a slightly more complex chart: a bar chart. We talk about what we can learn from a bar chart, and what a histogram is."
useMdx: true
privateVideoUrl: https://fullstack.wistia.com/medias/3toqfwsls5
---

# Making a Bar Chart

We'll walk through one last "basic" chart — once finished, you'll feel very comfortable with each step and we'll move on to even more exciting concepts like animations and interactions.

# Deciding the chart type

Another type of question that we can ask our dataset is: what does the _distribution_ of a metric look like? For example:

-   What kinds of humidity values do we have?
-   Does the humidity level generally stay around one value, with a few very humid days and a few very dry days?
-   Does it vary consistently, with no standard value?
-   Or are there really humid days and really dry days, with none in-between?

Looking at the scatter plot we just made, we can see the daily humidity values from the dots' vertical placement.

![Finished scatter plot](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/fullstack-d3-masterclass/module_02/lesson_02.00/public/images/2-making-a-scatterplot/scatterplot-finished.png)

But it's hard to answer our questions - do most of our dots fall close the middle of the chart? We're not entirely sure.

Next, we embark on a mission to create a slightly more complex chart: a bar chart. We talk about what we can learn from a bar chart, and what a histogram is.