Your first chart#

With Highcharts included in your webpage you are ready to create your first chart.

We will start off by creating a simple bar chart.

  1. Add a div in your webpage. Give it an id and set a specific width and height which will be the width and height of your chart.

    <div id="container" style="width:100%; height:400px;"></div>

  2. A chart is initialized by adding the JavaScript tag, <script> </script>, anywhere in a webpage, containing the following code. The div from #1 is referenced in the constructor.

    document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
            const chart = Highcharts.chart('container', {
                chart: {
                    type: 'bar'
                },
                title: {
                    text: 'Fruit Consumption'
                },
                xAxis: {
                    categories: ['Apples', 'Bananas', 'Oranges']
                },
                yAxis: {
                    title: {
                        text: 'Fruit eaten'
                    }
                },
                series: [{
                    name: 'Jane',
                    data: [1, 0, 4]
                }, {
                    name: 'John',
                    data: [5, 7, 3]
                }]
            });
        });

    If you are inserting a Stock chart, there is a separate constructor method called Highcharts.stockChart. In these charts, typically the data is supplied in a separate JavaScript array, either taken from a separate JavaScript file or by an XHR call to the server.

    let chart; // globally available
        document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
            chart = Highcharts.stockChart('container', {
                rangeSelector: {
                    selected: 1
                },
                series: [{
                    name: 'USD to EUR',
                    data: usdtoeur // predefined JavaScript array
               }]
           });
        });

  3. You should now see this chart on your webpage:

    bar-fruit-consumption.png

  4. Optionally, you can apply a global theme to your charts. A theme is just a set of options that are applied globally through the Highcharts.setOptions method. The download package comes with four predefined themes. To apply a theme from one of these files, add this directly after the highcharts.js file inclusion:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/themes/gray.js"></script>

For more details on how the options or settings in Highcharts work see How to set options.

Below is a list of online examples of the examples shown in this article:

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