ContentsBasic Charting

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Charting is the art of providing information in a non-verbal form to display quantities in comparison to an axis or other quantities. This art is a bit more specialized than "graphing", although it is often considered synonymous.

In my terminology, graphing is a science which is an underlying technology for charting. Charts attempt to be more clear and verbose (often having legends and axis labels), while graphs tend to be more concise and complex (packing as much information as possible into the display).

Engineers typically like to use graphs, while managers prefer charts because they communicate more information than raw data. Graphing is the use of colors and scaling to get data into a graphical form. Charting is the use and annotation of these graphs to clearly communicate the information represented by the quantities. The whole process of choosing graphing techniques and charting is generically called "Data Visualization".  If you want to get a more in-depth understanding of data visualization (aka "viz"), take a look at the Visualization Toolkit.
 

ContentsBasic Charting

Previous: Precisely print a square | Next: Plot a sine wave