New: Annotations in bar, range, and dot charts

Annotations are one of the most important elements you can add to your chart or map: They can help to add additional information, make your chart easier to understand, or can just be a simple way to point readers to the most important data points.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re adding text annotations and range & line highlights to eight more chart types: Bar charts, stacked bars, grouped bars, split bars, and bullet bars, as well as dot plots, range plots, and arrow plots.

Responsive design with all the details

The annotations in our bar charts come with everything you’re used to from annotations in our chart types:

• Free drag-and-drop positioning. When you click on Add text annotation, you can place the text directly in your chart. Above bars, next to them, below them — you choose.
• Arrows and circles. You want to highlight a narrow bar or a dot in a dot plot? Point to them with an arrow or use an annotation with a circle to explain them to readers.
• Responsive design. What look like beautiful annotations on desktop could be mess of overlapping text on a smaller screen. That’s why all mobile annotations are shown by default as a key below the chart. You can also decide to show certain annotations just on desktop devices (or just on mobile).
• Color and formatting. You can change the text color and font size of your annotations, make them bold or italic, add a text outline to improve their readability, and even use inline HTML to format individuals words.

You can learn more about Datawrapper annotations in this Academy article.

Annotations that stick to bars, even when resorting them

We want to give you the best possible annotation experience — and that means designing with the chart type in mind. In bar charts, data always comes in rows that can be grouped and resorted. Our bar chart annotations are built for just that.

First, each annotation is tied to a specific row. That means that if you change your bars’ thickness or even reorder them entirely, the annotation will still point to the same data:

While you can manually assign annotations to bars, you don’t have to: Just drag the annotation around like you’re used to, and Datawrapper will identify which bar you want to annotate:

Range and line highlights that can be repeated across groups

With this update, range and line highlights are coming to our bar charts and range/arrow/dot plots. They’re a great way to point out a threshold value or a certain date or timespan.

If you’ve chosen to group the data in your chart, you can create range and line highlights that repeat across all groups (or “panels”) , or stick to just one:

You can also repeat highlights in the panels of a split bar chart. Try it out by hovering over one of the charts on this page and clicking Edit this chart.

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Annotations for bar charts, stacked bars, grouped bars, split bars, bullet bars, dot plots, range plots, and arrow plots are available starting today for all our users, including on the free plan. We hope you’ll be able to create just the charts you need with this new feature.

Do you have questions or feedback? Get in touch with us at support@datawrapper.de. As always, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.