Line chart
Shows how a measure changes across an ordered, continuous axis, usually time.
The plain read: one series, its overall shape.
Use it when
- Showing trend, seasonality or acceleration
- Comparing a few series over the same period
Avoid it when
- Categories have no natural order
- More than three or four series overlap
Display modes
- Default
- The plain read: one series, its overall shape.
- Animated
- Draws the series month by month so the reader lives the sequence: the dip, then the recovery.
- Annotated
- Marks the events that explain the turns in the line, so shape is tied to cause.
- Comparative
- Overlays the target so the gap between actual and plan becomes the subject.
Seen in the wild
You Draw It: How Family Income Predicts Children’s College Chances
The New York Times, The Upshot · 2015
Education · interactive
What’s Really Warming the World?
Bloomberg · 2015
Climate · interactive
Life expectancy, in the Our World in Data grapher
Our World in Data
US unemployment rate (UNRATE)
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Labour economics · interactive
The 10 year minus 2 year Treasury spread
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Fixed income · interactive
IMF DataMapper, World Economic Outlook
International Monetary Fund
Macroeconomics · interactive
The Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard
Johns Hopkins University · 2020
Public health · dashboard
WHO COVID-19 dashboard
World Health Organization
Public health · dashboard
Global temperature anomaly
NASA
Climate · interactive
A TradingView symbol page
TradingView
Markets · interactive
The daily Treasury yield curve
US Department of the Treasury
Fixed income · interactive
The Looker Studio report gallery
Marketing and web analytics · dashboard
Grafana Play, the live demo instance
Grafana Labs
Infrastructure monitoring · dashboard
The Grafana community dashboard library
Grafana Labs and contributors
Infrastructure monitoring · dashboard
Amazon CloudWatch dashboards
Amazon Web Services
Cloud operations · dashboard
Earth Temperature Timeline
Randall Munroe, xkcd · 2016
The first line, bar and pie charts
William Playfair · 1786
The Keeling Curve
Charles David Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography · 1958
Climate · interactive
The crossing lines shown in Congress
Americans United for Life, shown at a congressional hearing · 2015
Health politics · static image
Articles about the line chart
More in Change over time
Area chart
A line chart with the area beneath it washed in, emphasising volume over time.
Stacked area chart
Layers several series on top of each other, showing the total over time and how it is composed.
Streamgraph
A stacked area around a wandering centre line, showing the ebb and flow of many categories over time.