If you’re working in the financial department of a company or just dealing with financial data, you may be familiar with the Previous-Budget-Actual bar chart. It’s frequently used, occupying critical presentation and dashboard space, but sadly it lacks data density, contributing only three observations.

Managers rarely have time to thoroughly explore financial presentations, that is why you need to make as much information available as quickly as possible — an easily readable data-dense visualization serves this purpose well. In my pursuit to make denser bar charts, I found five techniques that I will share here:

full article at Nightingale – the Journal of Data Vizualization Society.