Trend Chart Examples to Highlight Data Patterns

A trend chart is a powerful tool used to track data changes over time, helping to identify patterns, trends, and fluctuations. By displaying information in a visual, time-based format, trend charts make it easier to see both short-term variations and long-term trends.

They’re widely used in various fields, including finance, sales, marketing, and project management, to monitor progress, predict future performance, and make data-driven decisions.

Examples of trend charts include line charts, bar charts, and area charts, each suited to different types of data and analysis needs.

Table of Content:

1. What is a Trend Chart Example?
2. Best 4 Trend Chart Examples
3. Key Elements of an Effective Trend Chart
4. What are the Golden Benefits of Trend Charts?
5. Practical Applications of Trend Charts
6. How to Create Trend Charts in Google Sheets with Examples?
   • Example# 1
   • Example# 2
   • Example# 3
7. Reading and Interpreting Trend Charts
8. FAQs About Trend Chart Examples
9. Wrap Up

What is a Trend Chart Example?

Best 4 Trend Chart Examples

1. Sentiment Trend Chart

This chart tracks sentiment over time, often used in social media, customer feedback, or survey analysis to monitor shifts in positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.

Visualizing sentiment trends, helps businesses understand customer opinions, track reputation, and quickly respond to sentiment changes.

2. Multi-Axis Line Chart

A Multi-axis line chart allows you to display multiple datasets on different axes within the same chart. This is ideal for comparing related metrics that have different scales, such as temperature and precipitation, helping users analyze relationships between various factors over time.

3. Dual Axis Line Chart

Similar to a Multi-axis chart, a Dual-axis line chart uses two Y-axes on either side of the chart to represent two different data series. This type of chart is useful for tracking two distinct yet related metrics, such as sales volume and revenue, to show how they correlate over time.

4. Multi-Series Line Chart

A Multi-series line chart plots multiple data series on a single axis, allowing for easy comparison of multiple trends within one chart. For example, it’s useful in tracking product performance across different regions or comparing trends in various demographics, giving a clear view of patterns and relationships across multiple series.

What are the Golden Benefits of Trend Charts?

There are a few benefits of the trend chart that you should know.

Benefit #1: Incredibly Easy to Understand

It’s amazingly easy to interpret Sentiment Trend charts due to their simplicity and clarity.

These charts can empower your audience to understand the data, see interesting perspectives, and draw conclusions quickly. Remember, the backbone of any compelling message is its simplicity. So use simple visualizations to drive your audience to consume more of your story and, most importantly, act on your recommendations.

Benefit #2: You Can Use it to Spot Patterns

Sentiment Trend charts empower your audience to see with ease the emerging trends. This can compel them to embrace change or act on your recommendations swiftly.

Trends, shifts, and outliers make more sense when graphically represented. This is because visuals make it easier for you to identify strongly correlated parameters.

Certain correlations, associations, and distribution patterns in your data may not be that obvious. You need charts like Sentiment Trend to help you uncover relationships you didn’t even know existed.

Benefit # 3: Storytelling is More Engaging

A Sentiment Trend chart is one of the revolutionary visualization charts you can use to create meaningful stories out of your data.

Storytelling with data is incredibly vital in persuasion and simplifying communication. You can bet on Sentiment Trend charts to help you communicate engagingly with both your clients and teams. Conveying a message in a story is much more engaging and easier to understand.

You’re more likely to remember images and stories than typical words and numbers.

Benefit #4: Speed up the Decision-Making Process

Humans can process visual images much faster than text. Besides, a chart is easier for your brain to process than reading text and numbers in tables.

The Sentiment Trend Chart can dramatically improve the speed of the decision-making processes of your audience. According to the Wharton School of Business, simplified data visualization can shorten business meetings by up to 24%.

Why?

As we said earlier, for you to persuade people, you should strategically incorporate logos (logic), ethos (emotions), and pathos (personality). Charts, which are the bearers of insights, appeal to the logical part of our brains. Remember, we make decisions based on emotions and justify them with logic. So you have to give your audience data backed-insights for them to justify their actions.

Now that you’ve learned the benefits of Trend Charts let’s head to the next section. You’ll uncover where you can apply these charts to get the BEST out of your data.

Practical Applications of Trend Charts

There are many business domains where you can apply this chart:

  1. Trend Chart Example: Survey Storytelling

Survey data storytelling uses data insights in visualizations to tell a story about people’s views, opinions, and sentiments regarding a brand.

You can use a Sentiment Trend Chart to tell a story about the trend of market sentiments.

It’s incredibly easy to know what’s going on by taking a quick look at the Trend Charts. For instance, in the diagram above, the general trend of positive sentiment is rising.

  2. Trend Chart Example: Video Storytelling

Video storytelling is simply using the data of the metrics you’re tracking to tell a compelling story.

When you have a video on YouTube you want to know how much people interact with it. People’s responses as likes or dislikes depict how much they appreciate the video. If you look at the graph above you will get the idea that over the period of time, likes increased. In June, minimum dislikes came, and in August maximum likes came.

  3. Trend Chart Example: Product Storytelling

Product Sentiment reflects customer feelings toward a product, based on feedback, reviews, and social media.

Positive sentiment shows satisfaction, while negative sentiment highlights areas for improvement. Analyzing sentiment helps businesses improve products and customer experience.

Take a look at the diagram below:

How to Create Trend Charts in Google Sheets with Examples?

ChartExpo is an easy-to-use tool for creating trend charts, integrating with Google Sheets and Excel. It offers customizable options like line, bar, and Multi-axis charts to track changes over time.

With its intuitive interface, users can quickly design charts, customize colors, and adjust axes to highlight key trends. Ideal for both beginners and professionals, ChartExpo simplifies data visualization and helps users create clear, impactful trend charts effortlessly.

Example# 1

Let’s create a scenario with survey data. Imagine you run an e-commerce store, and you want to establish the target market sentiments using data. So you’ve put together a short survey on the Thank You Page of your site to ask customers what they like and dislike concerning:

• Customer service
• Shipping
• Price
• Selection
• Return policy
• Ordering process
• Communication

Essentially, you want to use data to know how your converting customers perceive your brand. The key metric is the count of both likes and dislikes. The key goal of the exercise is to optimize your sales funnel to drive more conversions and reduce drop-offs.

Let’s use the data below for the scenario.

Let’s start by exporting the data to Google Sheets. And then, unleash our ChartExpo Add-on, as shown below.

• Click Add-ons > ChartExpo > Open and then head to the Sentiment Analysis Charts section, as shown below.

• Look for Sentiment Trend Charts, as shown below.

• Select Sheet Name (sheet holding your data).
• Click Add New Metric and select the Column with the numerical value (Count).In our case, the metrics are the count of likes and dislikes.
• Click the Add New Dimension button and then select
• Click on Create Chart……BOOM! You have your beautiful Sentiment Trend chart.

Check out the resulting Chart below.

Insights

• The most disliked part of the E-commerce brand is the return policy.

• The most liked components of the e-commerce brand are namely selection and communication with customers.

• Recommendations: There’s a need to streamline the return policy to reduce dissatisfaction among converting customers.

Example# 2

As we said earlier, you can use Sentiment Trend Charts to visualize your video data for storytelling.

Imagine you run a YouTube account for your brand. You’ve been using this channel to tell captivating stories about your offers. You want to use data to gauge the opinion of the target market for your brand.

The key metric you’ll use is the count of likes and dislikes. And the dimension is time.

Remember, the process of visualizing your data using ChartExpo Add-on is similar to survey storytelling.

Let’s use the data below for the scenario.

Note: The process of visualizing the data above using ChartExpo is the SAME as survey storytelling. Let’s check out our resulting chart.

Insights

• The best month to promote brand stories is June, based on the number of likes and dislikes.
• June has the lowest dislikes.

Example# 3

Sentiment Trend Chart in ChartExpo library can provide you different facilities to make your chart more attractive to represent data for different purposes. You can even change the colors of the chart to show the non-sentiment data which may not be representing red or green.  Let’s take an example below to present such data.

A city wanted how many females and males have gotten doses of the vaccine and they also wanted to divide this age-wise. So, it can be easy to find which age group and gender is not taken dose. When they find age groups and gender, it will be easy for them to find reasons why those people are not vaccinated.

The city hall called all the vaccination centers and asked them to provide the data they needed for analysis. After 3 hours they got all the data they needed. One of them took data and tried to find trends in it.

First, he pasted all the data in Google Sheets.

He decided to visualize this data. So, everyone can easily understand it.

• Then, he first clicked on Add-ons > ChartExpo > Open and then Sentiment Analysis Charts and then clicked on Sentiment Trend Charts.
• Selected Sheet Name. Clicked on Add new metric and then selected Column which had numerical value Satisfied and Dissatisfied.
• Clicked on Add new dimension and then selected Column which had Months. Clicked on Create Chart.

This is a great nonsentiment data-based visualization that highlights different age groups treated in the local hospital since it was started. Moreover, this single chart is segregated based on male and female patients.

Reading and Interpreting Trend Charts

1. Examine the Time Axis: The X-axis typically represents time. Check the intervals (e.g., days, months) to understand the period the chart covers.
2. Identify the Trend: Look for upward, downward, or stable trends in the data. This helps to quickly spot if the value is increasing, decreasing, or staying constant over time.
3. Analyze Data Points: Focus on specific points on the chart to understand changes at certain times, identifying peaks, dips, or plateaus.
4. Consider Multiple Series: If there are multiple lines or data series, compare how they relate to each other to identify correlations or discrepancies.
5. Look for Anomalies: Identify any outliers or unusual data points that deviate from the general trend, as these may indicate important changes or events.

FAQs About Trend Chart Examples

What is a trend in data?

A “trend” is an upward or downward shift in a data set over time. It allows you to predict what might happen to the data in the future.

Which chart can help sentiment and non-sentiment trends?

There is a sentiment trend chart in ChartExpo Library which can help you create sentiment and non-sentiment trend charts.

What is the best chart to show trends?

The best chart to show trends is a line chart. It effectively displays data over time, making it easy to identify patterns, fluctuations, and overall trends.

Wrap Up:

There’s no doubt that Sentiment Trend Charts are among the simplest and easiest-to-read charts you can use to make your data narrative more compelling. We hope after having trend chart examples you will have well understanding of this visualization.

Sign up for ChartExpo today to create powerful data stories that empower your audience to take action using Trend Charts.

You have everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying the ChartExpo add-on for Google Sheets.