Designed by Stephen Few in 2005, the concept of the bullet graph is described in his book Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. The bullet graph replaces dashboard gauges and meters as they implicate a number of major issues:

• They display too little information.
• They take too much space.
• They are overloaded with distracting decoration details, which carry no valuable message.

The bullet graph overcomes these display issues. The bullet graph takes one key measure (for example, the current year-to-date revenue) and compares it to a target measure, displaying it in the context of qualitative ranges (bad, satisfactory and good). The qualitative ranges are marked as different variations of a single hue. Such approach restricts the use of abundant colors on a dashboard, making it easy to convey information to those who are color blind and providing flexible print options for both color and grayscale print media.

An example of a bullet graph with its labeled elements:

Bullet graphs may be orientated horizontally or vertically, and may be put together as a stack to analyze several data dimensions at once:

To learn how to do this in Data Dynamics Reporter, refer to Creating a bullet graph of this User Guide or go the Data Dynamics web site.