In yesterday's post, we showed a gallery of various line charts. In today's post, let's have a look at a variety of area charts.
Area charts have similar features to line charts. You have control over whether the area's line is rendered normally (straight), via a spline, or via steps. Markers can be displayed to highlight important data points. Negative values can be rendered in an alternate appearance. Multiple overlapping area series can be rendered in the same chart.
In multiple area series scenarios, you can also set the areas to "stack". In this case the second series renders its values on top of the first series' values. This gives you a good comparison of each series' values at the same X-coordinate and also lets you see the big picture total.
There is another option for multiple area series to render in stacked 100% mode. In this mode, the series render to fill the height. At any given X-coordinate, the height of each rendered series indicates its value percentage relative to the total.
In the next post, we'll look at a variety of bar charts.