Online Dating Users Profile

Thirty percent of U.S. adults say they have used online dating, as shown in this horizontal 100% stacked bar chart. Younger, urban and lower income adults are more likely to have used online dating sites or apps. The largest difference was between those who identified as LGB (55% reported using online dating site or app) and those who identified as straight (28%). Gender, education level and racial differences were much smaller. Data were reported by Pew Research.

Online Dating Users Profile in a Horizontal 100% Stacked Bar Chart

How I Made this Online Dating Horizontal 100% Stacked Bar Chart

Here is the online dating data I used to create the chart:

There are two Mekko Graphics features that I wanted to highlight in this chart. I used these features to group the bars. Bar gaps are separators between two bars. I added one between the 'Women' bar and the '18-29' bar. You add a bar gap by clicking on the x axis (in this case the vertical axis) between the two bars. Drag the gray arrow that appears until the mouse-over says "Add 1 Gap." This gives the spacing that allows for the grouping that is shown in the chart. I also added a data column in column D above and used it for the group labels. These labels appear to the right of the chart by default. I moved them to the left, aligned their lefts, centered them in their respective groups, and then bolded them.

Here's how I made the horizontal 100% stacked bar chart:

type the series labels into column A from the Pew Research report
enter the Yes data into column B and use a formula =1-Bx to compute the data in column C
add data in D to provide group headers as described above
use Switch bars and Series button to treat rows as bars and columns as series
show column D as a data column
add the bar gaps as described above to separate the groups
reduce the space between bars to 0 to place the ungapped bars next to each other
adjust the internal chart margins to leave room on right for headers and little room on top and bottom
move data column labels to right as described above
reduce segment borders to .25
show values as percentage in each segment
lasso and hide percentage labels in right segment of each bar
change series colors to blue and gray as in chart
add y axis title as in chart and move to top of bar, make italic and left align with data column labels