The horizontal bar chart is especially useful if your category names are long, as the text is written from left to right, as most audiences read, making your graph legible for your audience. Also, because of the way we typically process information—starting at top left and making z’s with our eyes across the screen or page—the structure of the horizontal bar chart is such that our eyes hit the category names before the actual data. This means by the time we get to the data, we already know what it represents (instead of the darting back and forth our eyes do between the data and category names
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