Expert: Josh - 9/7/2004

Question
I know this may seem like a simple question, but what is the difference between a table and a chart? Thanks for your help.

Answer
Hi Hope,

Your question reminds me of a presentation that I attended some months ago, in which, the executive refers to all textual information and graphical illustrations as charts. This is, of course, in my opinion, an abuse of the term. But in the commercial world, scientific and mathematical facts are often distorted (politics aside).

A widely accepted definition is that a table generally involves tabulation of numerical figures, showing the relationship between two or more variables. Thus, it is a way of demonstrating the trend between an independent and dependent variable. An example might be the height of students as a function of age. Here, "age" is the independent variable, "height" is the dependent variable, so called, because we have reasons to believe that the height changes with age (in the range of interest, say from the age of 12 to 17). Often, experimental data, results of survey etc. involve some measure that records the frequency of occurrence of events as observed in a sampled population. For instance, scientists might be interested in establishing the side effects of a new drug in a medical trial. Such raw data are often presented in a table.

People usually think of charts as some graphical illustration of the trends contained in the data. It is a practical means for understanding the overall behavior. There are various ways of presenting such information, it all depends on what the situation calls for. Common examples include line graphs, histograms, pie charts and scatter plots.

These explanations are the more widely accepted definitions for the general community, not specifically for the maths specialist. In fact, the word "graph theory" takes on an entirely different meaning to what an average person would expect. It is a branch of discrete mathematics and it is useful for modeling state transitions. Its applications include the field of computing science and engineering. Most people probably aren't aware that sophisticated traffic/network control algorithms would involve "graph theory".

If you work in the nursing profession, a "chart" is used as a jargon. It refers to the record of observations of a patient. You won't find drawings there I'm sure.