Chart types we don't support, and why we'd rather tell you up front

Chart types we don't support, and why we'd rather tell you up front

There are a few chart types you can build in Google Sheets that Chartcastr will see and politely decline to render. We figured the most useful thing was to be specific about which ones, why, and what we'd suggest instead, rather than ship a half-baked render that misleads the reader of the Slack message.

The honest list, with the reasoning.

What's not supported today

The chart types we detect in your spreadsheet but don't render:

• Candlestick, financial OHLC charts.
• Histogram, distributions in fixed-width bins.
• Bubble, scatter with a third axis encoded as dot size.
• Waterfall, running totals with positive/negative contributions.
• Treemap, hierarchical area-as-volume.
• Org chart, node-and-edge org structures.
• Scorecard, single-number callouts with optional sparkline.
• Geographic / region charts, values painted onto a map.

Why we hold the line

The short version: each of these chart types has a "right answer" that's harder than it looks, and a wrong answer that's worse than no chart at all.

A treemap rendered with the wrong proportions misleads in a way a bar chart never would. A candlestick stripped of its open/close logic just shows random rectangles. A geo chart with the wrong projection or the wrong shade scale tells a story that isn't true. We'd rather not render those at small Slack-thumbnail sizes than render them badly.

The longer version, per type, is "we don't yet have the rendering primitives we'd be confident shipping". Not "this can't be done", just "not yet".

What to use instead

For most of these, there's a substitute that gets most of the value:

• Candlestick → a simple line chart of close price plus a separate area chart of volume. You lose the open/high/low/close compression. You keep the trend.
• Histogram → pre-bin the data in Sheets and render as a bar chart. More work in the sheet, but it works today and the result is clearer.
• Bubble → scatter plot, drop the size dimension or move it to a small companion chart.
• Waterfall → stacked bar chart with two segments (positive contributions, negative contributions). Doesn't show the running total visually, but the same numbers come through.
• Treemap → if there's a clear hierarchy and a small number of leaves, a stacked bar by category. If there's a deeper hierarchy, this is one of the cases where a chart is the wrong shape and a table is right.
• Scorecard → a number in your Slack message. Chartcastr's AI summaries can foreground a single KPI as a sentence, which is what a scorecard is.
• Org chart / Geo chart → no good substitute. Use the source.

When this matters less than it sounds

In practice, Slack reporting trends toward a small set of shapes, bars, lines, stacked bars, the occasional pie or scatter. The unsupported list is mostly dashboard-decoration types that don't survive the trip to a thumbnail anyway. We've found teams adapt fast once they see what does ship well.

What we'd actually like to hear

If one of these chart types is a real blocker for you, meaning you have data that genuinely needs that visualisation and the substitutes above don't work, we want to know. The list of "asked about by paying customers" is the input we use to prioritise.

Email us with a screenshot of the chart and a one-line explanation of the decision it supports. Those notes go directly into the next round of "what should we render".

What does ship today

Six chart types, all rendered faithfully:

• Bar (vertical and horizontal)
• Line
• Area (regular and stepped)
• Scatter
• Pie / donut
• Combo (rendered as line, see the combo charts post)

That covers the substantial majority of business reporting. If you want the umbrella read on what does work, see Premade Charts from Google Sheets, the deep tour. Full reference at the Premade Charts docs.