---
title: "Level 2. Charts"
id: "1784"
type: "page"
slug: "charts"
published_at: "2026-09-20T21:35:45+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-09-20T21:42:56+00:00"
url: "https://xedant.com/agents/analytics/docs/templates/charts"
markdown_url: "https://xedant.com/agents/analytics/docs/templates/charts.md"
excerpt: "The second level is about making data visible. Nine lessons teach you to pick the…"
---

# Level 2. Charts

[https://xedant.com/agents/analytics/docs/templates/charts.md](https://xedant.com/agents/analytics/docs/templates/charts.md)

The second level is about making data visible. Nine lessons teach you to pick the right chart for the question: compare, see a trend, spot a pattern, show where people leave. And — more important — to notice when a chart lies. After this level you will read any chart in seconds and build honest pictures that speak for themselves.

Every lesson is a template with demo data: ten minutes to complete, one skill that stays. Open it in the Templates section of Analytics Agent and press “Use this template” to take the lesson on your own data.

### Bars or Lines: Comparing vs Trend

**Shows:** bars answer “who is bigger”, lines answer “where it is heading”; a bar axis must start at zero, or the differences get multiplied. A live example shows the drop you can only see on an honest line.

**You get:** the two-chart rule covers most day-to-day questions — and you stop building “pretty” charts that lie.

### Pie Charts and Their Traps

**Shows:** a pie is honest when there are few slices and one clearly dominates; for precise comparison, angles and areas are the eye’s weakest spot: no one can tell 6.0% from 6.25% in a pie, while in bars it is obvious; and when you need to keep the whole makeup of many parts, the pie gives way to a treemap.

**You get:** you stop using pies for serious decisions and know what to use instead.

### Histogram: The Shape of Numbers

**Shows:** a histogram sorts numbers into bins and shows the shape of the data — where the mass sits, where the tail stretches. On 800 customers you see that a typical customer buys once or twice while rare fans buy up to twelve times; the mean and median are drawn right on the shape, and the bin count moves with a slider — from four, which hide the shape, to thirty, which fragment it.

**You get:** the answer to “what is typical” arrives as a picture, not a guessed average.

### Scatter Plot: Two Numbers Side by Side

**Shows:** 40 stores as 40 points — the cloud shows whether budget and sales grow together; clumps and lone points get checked, not deleted.

**You get:** a first honest meeting with “grow together — still not cause”, which protects you from false conclusions.

### Box Plot: Where the Middle Lives

**Shows:** level and spread at a glance: two products with the same median can have twice the spread of checks, and the points beyond the whiskers are a reason to ask, not to delete.

**You get:** the “how do groups differ” comparison — the one where bars of averages are powerless.

### Heatmap: Color Shows Intensity

**Shows:** a “day × hour” matrix painted with color: on Friday evening, 3 of the 84 hours in the grid carry 11.9% of the week’s receipts, and dead Monday is visible at once. Color finds the pattern, tables confirm it with numbers.

**You get:** “when and where” questions get answered in two seconds and always backed by a number.

### Waterfall and Funnel: From What to What

**Shows:** a waterfall takes money apart step by step — from revenue to profit — while a funnel counts people: visits, carts, payments. The leak shows where the chain drops, not in one overall number.

**You get:** you learn exactly where and by how much costs press and customers are lost.

### Choosing the Right Chart

**Shows:** a two-question filter covers almost any task: compare — bars, trend — line, distribution — histogram, relationship — points, intensity — color. And a cheat sheet live, right away: seven mini-charts built from one table.

**You get:** choosing a chart stops being a matter of taste and becomes the answer to “what do I want to see”.

### Honest Charts: Fixing a Misleading One

**Shows:** a “before and after” teardown: axis from zero, one scale per chart, one meaning per color, a label on every axis — plus a ten-second test: cover the title and ask “what do I see first?”. The truncated axis labels itself, and revenue and clicks sit on their own labeled scales, not on one shared scale.

**You get:** you spot misleading charts in other people’s reports and stop drawing them in your own.

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