# Getting over Mathematica Bar Chart Limitations….

I am trying to create a pareto chart for some non technical folks and having the hardest time formatting it correctly…

Here’s my sample code:

(*Some dynamically generated data *)

mydata = {0.9436, 2.20725333345, 2.1402, 1.8729, 4.9436, 0.4819};
mylabels = {"l1", "l2", "l3", "l4", "some really long label", "another really long label", "l7"};

(*lets riffle and sort the data *)

a =  Sort[ Partition[Riffle[mylabels, mydata], 2], #1[[2]] > #2[[2]] & ];

BarChart[a , BarOrigin -> Left, BarSpacing -> -1, LabelingFunction -> (Placed[#, After] &), Axes -> None, Frame -> True, FrameTicks -> None, FrameLabel -> "Some Title", GridLines -> None, AspectRatio -> 0.3, ImageSize -> Full, ChartStyle -> "Pastel"]


A few questions:

• What is the best way to truncate to 2 digits in the labels, I tried using NumberForm in the Sort function but doesn’t work since Numberform is a wrapper.

• Labeling works reasonably well when labels are short but I seem to run into placement issues with long labels… Any ideas on better ways to handle this?

• Frame produced by Mathematica seems to overlap with the labels…

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You are aware of the ParetoPlot function? –  Sjoerd C. de Vries Apr 1 '13 at 16:58
Yes… same issues apply to Pareto as well.. I thought asking a question about BarCharts may garner more responses…. –  Pam Apr 1 '13 at 17:02

Here's one approach.

mydata = N[Round[{0.9436, 2.20725333345, 2.1402, 1.8729, 4.9436, 0.4819}*100]/100];


This will make the data appear with only 2 decimal places of accuracy. If you are willing to rearrange things a bit, it's pretty easy to remove the overlap...

BarChart[Labeled[#2, #1, Before] & @@@ a, BarSpacing -> 0,
LabelingFunction -> (Placed[#, After] &), BarOrigin -> Left,
PlotLabel -> "Some Title"]


This gives:

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That works… why doesn’t N[mydata,2] work? –  Pam Apr 1 '13 at 17:26
Because the numbers you have are floating point... this would work if the argument were rational. For example, if you had expressed mydata as {47/50, 221/100, 107/50, 187/100, 247/50, 12/25}, then N[mydata,{4,3}] would do what you want. –  bill s Apr 1 '13 at 17:56
Makes sense… thanks –  Pam Apr 1 '13 at 18:18