Line Chart

The recipe here is pretty simple. We start with a goodly amount of data points (maybe the closing prices of stocks over a period of time). We add in a dash of x- and y-axis. We stir until every data point is plotted on the graph. Lastly, we top it off with a line connecting each data point to the one before it in chronological order.

Line charts are great for showing trends over time. We just need to be careful not to assume that the value we’re tracking actually took on the value the line predicts in-between our data points. We don’t know what its value was because we didn’t measure it at that time, just at some time before it and after it. Also called a line graph.