I came across an interesting paper earlier on data visualisation – published last year in Plos One, Weissgerber et al set out reasons why bar or line graphs can be misleading when presenting continuous data. It’s well worth a read:

Weissgerber TL, Milic NM, Winham SJ, Garovic VD (2015) Beyond Bar and Line Graphs: Time for a New Data Presentation Paradigm. PLoS Biol 13(4):e1002128. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002128

The authors also provide some Excel templates in the supplementary information for creating figures that are more useful than bar or line graphs, including scatterplots, paired plots, etc. I have taken their data and created those plots in ggplot2 (using some dplyr and knitr magic to make the data usable), and published that code over at RStudio’s excellent ‘Rpubs’ resource. Check it out here:

http://rpubs.com/tomhouslay/beyond-bar-line-graphs