Let's talk about line charts.

They are fantastic for comparing different items or

sources of similar data over a period of time.

Here, we are looking at a spreadsheet with membership data for

a fictional gym business.

But, we could also think of this as looking at total revenue for

different store locations, or profit from different products over a period of time.

Again, line charts are fantastic for

comparing different items of similar data over time.

So let's create a line chart with the gym membership data in front of us.

First, I'm going to select all the data I wanna chart.

And then I'm going to use my keyboard shortcut, Alt + N, and

the line chart short cut is N, so I'll press N again.

2-D line, correct, and there we are.

You can see, the line chart allows us to quickly see the story of the gym business,

because we can see the relative size of different locations to each other.

And how their membership fluctuates over the course of the year.

So, I'm going to make this a little bigger.

And I'm actually going to move this chart to its new sheet.

I'm gonna call it GymMembers.

So, for example, the Burnside and

Southeast locations are the biggest in the network.

Up here, Southeast is the green line.

Burnside is this yellow line.

We see that North 2 started out as the smallest location and

grew quickly over the year.

Maybe this is a new location.

Also, for pretty much all locations,

the membership declines over the course of the year, which could be normal.

Lots of people start off the year with their New Years resolutions, and it makes

sense that we would see higher membership in the beginning of the year as a result.

This is called seasonality, in business, certain periods of the year are gonna be

higher demand or make up a larger portion of your revenue for the year.

Think of retail companies and

how important the Christmas holidays are to them.

Or what about an ice cream company?

We'd expect to see much higher sales in the warm summer months than in the winter.

Let's get back to the gym business.

We can see some of the locations are having larger declines than the others.

Maybe North, which is the gray line,

is declining because North 2 is taking away some of their members.

Something known as cannibalization, in business.

That is taking away from your existing business or

products by launching new products or locations.

Let's look at this same chart in column form.

Yikes, that doesn't make the story clearer at all.

So using a line chart is preferable when charting

multiple series of data over time.

The story is much clearer.