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 Figure 3. A bar chart of the number of people playing different card games on Sunday and Wednesday.

The bars in Figure 3 are oriented horizontally rather than vertically. The horizontal format is useful when you have many categories because there is more room for the category labels. We’ll have more to say about bar charts when we consider numerical quantities later in this chapter.

Some graphical mistakes to avoid

Don’t get fancy! People sometimes add features to graphs that don’t help to convey their information. For example, 3-dimensional bar charts such as the one shown in Figure 4 are usually not as effective as their two-dimensional counterparts. 70