Charts

Line Chart Generator

A line or area chart from any CSV, drawn as SVG in the page and downloadable as a file.

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How to use this tool

  1. Paste your data with the time or sequence labels in the first column and each series in its own column after it.
  2. Turn on the area fill if you are showing a single cumulative quantity; leave it off when comparing series, where the fills would obscure each other.
  3. Select Draw the line chart.
  4. Check that no row is missing. Gaps are drawn as if the time were continuous, so a skipped month becomes an invisible flat stretch.

What line chart generator does

A line chart says something a bar chart cannot: that the points are connected, that what happened between them followed the path drawn. That is why it belongs to data with a real order — time, distance, temperature — and why using one for unordered categories quietly asserts a continuity that is not there.

Paste a first column of labels and one or more numeric columns and this draws each as a line, optionally filled as an area. The horizontal axis is spaced evenly by row rather than by date, which is the honest limitation to know: if your rows skip a month, the gap will not show as a gap. The result is SVG, downloadable and editable as text.

Frequently asked questions

No. The horizontal axis is evenly spaced by row, so a gap between 1 March and 1 June looks the same as one between 1 March and 2 March. For evenly sampled data that is exactly right; for irregular data it flattens the timing, so fill in the missing rows before you chart it.

When the quantity is cumulative and there is one of it — storage used, total signups. The filled area implies accumulation, which is a claim, and it stops being true the moment you have several series, because each fill then hides the ones behind it.

For a bar chart, always — the length is the message. For a line chart, not necessarily: the message is the shape of the change, and forcing zero onto a series that moves between 98 and 102 flattens the very thing you are looking at. This tool starts a line at zero only when all the values are positive, and says so.

As many columns as you paste, with eight distinct colours before they repeat. Readability gives out long before that: past four or five lines the chart becomes a tangle, and the usual fix is to split it into several small charts with a shared axis rather than to find more colours.