Here at Idealware world headquarters, we're working on a report on Tools to Graphically Depict Data on a Shoestring (I know, the title needs some work). We're still very much doing research and writing, but we've mapped out a pretty decent view of the tools that are available in this space, so I thought I'd share and see if you know of any I'm missing.
Here's what I've got, for tools that will help you display quantitative data in a visual form without a lot of time, money, or specific skills:
- Excel: the obvious one. It's quite a flexible and complex tool compared to the others (though those go together -- it's flexibility is so obscure and complicated that many don't know it's there), but it doesn't make it easy to publish graphs online or even in polished printed form.
- Google Docs : nice features for both simple and more interactive graphs, and pretty polished graphs, though very little control over the look of them (check out both the Charts and the Widgets features). All can be easily embedded. Free.
- ManyEyes : the best known of the online visualization tools, with a lot of great format options, and pretty professional looking (though again, very little control over the look). You must publically publish your data with ManyEyes in order to use the tool. Free.
- DabbleDB : lets you create nice, simple graphics from data; simple and easy. Free if you share your data; $8/user/ month otherwise
- Swivel , iCharts , WidGenie : all online tools that let you easily create charts from data, and then publish them. We're still researching them, so I don't know as much about them.
Those are ones you don't need a programmer to use; if you've got a programmer, consider
FusionCharts or
Chart Director as coding language plug-in libraries, or the
Google Visualization API ,
Yahoo Charting API or
Open Flash Charts . Or if this is going to be a big part of what you do, consider
R or
Processing as visualization/ stats specific programming languages. (tip 'o the hat to
Chris Mulligan at YouGov for the Yahoo API and Open Flash Chart)
What else is out there? What have I missed?
