What’s the difference between a Bar chart and Histogram?
The real question of course is does it really make any difference. If you are a statistician then it probably does but to the uninitiated it’s not something that you’d pick up on. Knowing the difference between a bar chart and a histogram does give you a certain bit of clout and makes you look like a “know it all” when someone presents a histogram as a bar chart. “Um, I think you’ll find that’s a histogram actually” you can say.
William Playfair invented the Barchart and it’s a pretty safe bet that he would enjoy the toing and froing of which is a bar chart and which is a histogram. Both are totally adequate in displaying data so it can be easily understood, which was Playfair’s primary purpose back in the day when he was writing about Scottish imports and exports. He would have benefited from converting PDF to Excel allowing him to convert all that data onto the Excel spreadsheet and producing lots of nice Bar charts and histograms.
So what is the difference? Well, simply put Bar charts have gaps and histograms have the bars joined together. The crucial point is that bar charts show categorical data and histogram charts show quantitative (numbers) and it’s important not to mix that up.
