Introduction: Bar Charts and Drop-Down Menus

We now have all the basics we need to easily construct interactive features linking page elements and produce interactive dashboards. The main concepts have been covered with the help of several examples, and we’ll now be focusing on specific types of charts and the different options that they provide. More importantly, we’ll go into additional details that customize our charts and make them suitable for several purposes—firstly, in order to be good enough to publish and share with a wider audience as opposed to just existing for our interactive use and secondly, to ensure that they properly fit on a page that potentially contains other components, making sure we utilize the available space in an optimal way. Another important aspect to cover is the dynamic nature of the charts that our users can generate. Based on the option the user chooses in an interactive component, the resulting dataset might contain 7 or maybe 70 elements to plot. In some cases, it might not contain any data. This dramatically affects the resulting charts and their usability and can even make them difficult to read in certain cases. We’ll explore a few solutions to cater to these situations.