How to create a line chart

Line charts are ideal if you want to show trends and developments over time. They're one of the most common chart types, and your readers will find them easy to read and to understand. 

This and the next article explain how to create the following line chart. We explain all the settings you'll encounter on the way:

1

Preparing and importing the data

Before you can import the data to Datawrapper, you need to prepare it. 

Your data set needs to have the following structure: 

  • One column contains the dates/times that will be plotted on your horizontal axis. You'll find an overview of date formats that Datawrapper will interpret correctly here.
  • One or more column contain(s) the values for each line that will be visualized. 

For more in-depth information on how to clean your dataset before importing it into Datawrapper, read this blogpost.

Now that your data is prepared, you can get it into Datawrapper! To do so, go to app.datawrapper.de and click on Create new chart – or simply click here. This will bring you to step 1: Upload data of a 4-step process. 

Here you can copy & paste data from Excel or the web, upload your own CSV files, and even link to live data. We simply copy and paste the data into the text field:

Please note: Datawrapper can handle line charts with up to 1,000 data points. After that threshold performance of many browsers slows down a bit – so try to stay below that number. 

Once you got your data into Datawrapper, it's time to check it. To do so, click on Proceed in the lower left corner. This will bring you to:

2

Check & Describe

In step 2: Check & Describe, you'll see that Datawrapper placed your data in a proper table and interpreted it as either dates (green), numbers (blue), or text (black):

Click on Proceed, and Datawrapper will take you to the next step: Visualize.

3

Visualize

Step 3: Visualize, has four substeps: Chart type, Refine, Annotate, and Layout. In the first step, Chart type, you can play around which visualization type will work best for your data. 

To create a line chart, choose the chart type Lines (it's also selected by default):Congratulations! You just created a line chart. 

We explain how you can  customize your line chart and bring out the story you want to tell with it in a separate article here.

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