Storytelling with Data’s Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic has posted another challenge in her #SWDchallenge series, challenging the data visualisation community to come up with a basic bar chart as the latest monthly challenge.

I love bar charts, they are my favourite kind of chart to use for visualising data alongside line graphs and slope charts. With simple datasets, I always go for the bar chart as its an easy way of creating a quick visualisation with very little effort without spending hours building a complicated viz.

For the March 2018 #SWDchallenge series, I wanted to create a basic bar chart using some data from VGChartz, WikiRaider and Wikipedia on the Tomb Raider video game series. The game has been a big part of my life growing up when I owned a PlayStation console so it was the go-to dataset for creating a basic bar chart.

Wrangling the data was quite tough due to video game sales data always changing, so once I got it all together into a spreadsheet, I was ready to go and build the bar chart in Tableau.

When I built my bar chart in Tableau, what stood out was Tomb Raider II still remains the best-selling Tomb Raider of the series on the PlayStation platform, despite the game being released way back in November 1997.

When I posted this first iteration of my #SWD challenge on social media, I immediately got some feedback from Cole on Twitter.

Cole had a good point, the labels were separate which meant it would be very difficult for the user to see the label from left to right. Taking on her advice, I put the labels at the end of the bars, making two visual elements into one.

With that said, here’s my improved #SWDchallenge entry for March 2018 on Tomb Raider sales data on the main PlayStation consoles.