There are trade-offs. The advantage of a common baseline for comparisons (as well as space for labeling) should not *always* be enough to tip the decision to favor simple or cluster bar charts.

Sometimes, the advantage in compactness and in obviousness of an underlying part-to-whole relationship should tip the decision to favor stacked bar charts.

You could survey and chart {how many of your readers use pie charts, and how many of your readers use dot plots} in the same cluster of a bar chart. It wouldn’t be kosher to show those numbers in the same stack (or the same pie) because these categories overlap rather than add up towards your whole readership. Thus the stack immediately, even subconsciously, communicates more information than a cluster to an aware audience.

The lack of a common baseline reduces the effectiveness of the stacked bar chart. If the comparison of items is either very easy due to huge differences in magnitude, as in this example (power is upwards of 90% of the total), then a stacked chart illustrates that one group of items is much larger or smaller than other groups of items. I don’t think it conveys this any better than a clustered chart with the short items adjacent to the long items.

With such customizations, I agree that a simple or cluster bar chart can convey a part-to-whole relationship very effectively.

If we are limited to standard Excel charts that modestly skilled users can create without your Waterfall Chart utility, then I would ask:

Does a Stacked Bar Chart Beat a Simple Bar Chart
(When We Don’t Want To Resort To a Pie Chart)?

I vote yes – for this dataset. (Feel free to use my stacked bar chart as a good or bad example. )

For this simple case of three conveyors, a table would be fine. However, a table doesn’t lend itself to the immediate visual impact of orders of magnitude differences in values. I should have sorted the bars a la Pareto. I’ve corrected this oversight, and the color consistency Naomi brought up, in this chart:

There are a couple ways to show the total cost without displaying it as a bar like the others. For example, it can be drawn as a lighter bar in the background, and the formatting sets it and its data labels apart:

Taking the Pareto display further, the items can be stacked, and since what’s most important is the order of magnitude, the lack of a common baseline isn’t too critical:

There are numerous variations. How’s this waterfall-like approach?

This applies alternate labeling in place of the legend:

No 100% bar; just a final 100% label, almost adding a little table to the chart.

Jon, why don’t we use the XY Chart Labeler add-in to implement this — perhaps with a hidden dummy series on the axis for the % labels if we want to keep engineering unit labels on the original bar chart or column chart series! — to create aligned % labels “Inside Base” and then also move these labels over outside even the category labels, so the % labels align and we have room to add an extra text label claiming that they sum to 100%?

This should also work for a cluster bar/column chart, where each group could be shown to sum to 100%.

Pareto the costs from biggest to smallest, switch the TOTAL to a bottom line, and we’ve got a simpler and more obvious and more accurate display of business information than any of these charts.

Need to gain the attention of a tired audience with a graphic? Well, if you’re not into graphical correctness for its own sake, why not use a stacked bar chart or even the much maligned pie chart array to communicate the big picture message quickly and intuitively? (Whatever you use, you can still Pareto it.)

By including the total as its own bar, it seems to me that Jon’s cluster bar chart creates the wrong first impression of two comparably big expenses. By contrast, a stacked bar chart or even lowly pie chart screams that Power is the overwhelming expense, Parts an order of magnitude behind in second, and Operator another order of magnitude behind. That’s a pretty simple message, so simple charts can work.

For this simple dataset, there aren’t any close calls, so the extra potential accuracy of a bar chart with a common baseline is moot. Anyone who wants high precision should rely on the table, which can be augmented with %’s at least as easily as the charts can be labeled with them.

Note: none of these linear charts can reveal that minor expenses Operator and Maintenance are identical in $ terms across conveyors, but the table does, if that fact matters to the presenter or anyone in the audience.

To Jon: I find consistency helpful when comparing graphs. It is confusing when maintenance is green and parts orange in the originals and the reverse is true in the redo.
Even when I don’t like the original colors, I tend to use them with redraws to make the comparisons clearer.

What I don’t get is why you didn’t go straight for a stacked column/bar chart instead of the $ total bar plus %breakdown bars for each series. It would have been a lot cleaner with a single bar for each series with the % breakdown shown as a separate segment of each bar. Granted, some of those elements have tiny %s and those will be a bit of a headache when trying to figure out where best to put the labels, but better to use a single bar for each series than the 4 % bars and the single $ total bar, no?