Scatter plot – an overview

What is it for? 

The scatter plot is a powerful and multifunctional template for creating two-dimensional scatter plots, bubble charts, Hans Rosling charts, box plots, beeswarm charts and violin plots.

It's ideal for showing correlation, trends and outliers, and extra information can be encoded using colour, shape and size. Data can also be divided into multiple smaller datasets using the Grid of charts feature.

How to get started

1

To make a simple scatter chart, all you need is two columns of data: one for the x (horizontal) axis and one for the y (vertical) axis. Each row is plotted as a dot, and the spread of dots on the chart shows the relationship between the two metrics. Addition columns can be used to set the colour, size and shape of the dots, or to create interactive controls and custom popups.

Name	Category to colour by	X values	Y values	Category or value to size by
Hong Kong SAR, China	East Asia & Pacific	42351.0246	84.27804878	7305700
Japan	East Asia & Pacific	34474.13736	83.84365854	127141000
Macao SAR, China	East Asia & Pacific	75573.48071	83.59490244	600942
Italy	Europe & Central Asia	30049.14755	83.4902439	60730582
Spain	Europe & Central Asia	25683.84565	83.3804878	46447697

2

If your data has a column with years or dates, you can create an animated scatter showing change over time. Select a Time column in the Select columns to visualise panel to create a slider and choose one or more Name columns so the template knows which rows represent the same thing. Read more about creating an animated scatter plot here.

3

If you're overwhelmed by the number of points, you can choose a Filter column to create a menu to switch between subsets of the data.  Read more about creating a scatter plot with a filter here.



4

You can include as many Info columns as you like to display inside your popups, and advanced users can even use HTML and CSS to pull in pictures or videos from a column of image or video URLs. Read more about adding custom popups here.