How to plot reads in IGV?

[Tiffany G]

I made a bed file with columns containing chr, start, end but when I loaded the file into IGV I got a 2D plot that looked like refgenes instead of mapped reads and composite peaks (i.e. a normal ChIP track). How do I get it to look like a histogram/ChIP track? What are the necessary information to include.

[igv-help]

That is how .bed files are displayed. 

The following file formats can be displayed as bar charts: .bedGraph, wig, bigWig, tdf.  

If you want to display mapped reads along with a coverage chart, you need to load a .bam or .cram file.

You can see more about file formats that IGV accepts here: https://igv.org/doc/desktop/#FileFormats/DataTracks/