Generally, a pictograph or pictogram is a picture that represents a word or an idea such as a smiley used in email messages to convey mood or emotions.
In a spreadsheet program such as Excel a pictograph uses pictures to represent numerical data in a chart or graph.
As an example, in the pictograph image to the right, pictures of cookies are used in the column chart to represent the different type of cookies sold by a bakery.
The different heights of the columns in the pictograph tell us how many cookies of each type were sold by the bakery over a certain period of time.
In addition a pictograph can also be used to represent relative amounts when comparing more than one series of data; the larger the image, for example, the greater the value of the data.
When using a pictograph to convey relative amounts it is important to ensure that the sizes of all images are proportional to the data they represent so that the pictograph is visually accurate.
Related Tutorials
