Online Graphing and Charting Software

Using online graphing for sales projections or some sort of statistical information, you have seen ‘business graphics’ in use.





The default tool for doing business graphics is Microsoft Excel, and, more recently, Open Office Calc. Both of these are spreadsheets, useful for manipulating the data and drawing trend analysis, with built in charting tools and graphing tools. (Excel is, in the hands of an expert, the McGyver's Pocket Knife of office applications, able to go from financials to interactive forms to presentations). However, those tools do have some limits.

The first limit is that there is no simultaneous coordination and interaction with multiple users on the same document. This can be a problem when you are trying to coordinate several people into making one coordinated display.

The second is that there are severe limits on the number of things you can do with the data presentation tools present. Finally, if you need a constantly updated online graph on a web site, Excel will drive you insane with data import and export tools.

This is where online charting applications come in. Some of them are free services that let you import data into them and give you more options for display capabilities than Excel does; this can be handy if you need to make charts that Excel doesn't support, like good scatter plots for scientific displays, or multiple layer charts where you're overlaying several trend lines on a data set.

One of the founders of this type of tool is Vizlytics, which started out as a set of web based tools for building charts from different data sources (rather than just Excel) and has grown with more design templates, and a broader appeal in the scientific and statistical communities as their offerings have grown.

Other tools are web applications that can take a dynamic data feed and give you a chart that updates continuously as the data gets updated; these will usually be Java based or PHP driven, a few have Flash front ends (though that's becoming more common as Flash becomes the de-facto standard.)

Some of the better ones in this space include ChartGizmo, BlockTool, ChartDemo and CreateAGraph. While not as feature rich as Vizlytics, they all offer a detailed subset of graphic choices that may be exactly what you need without digging through the clutter of what you do not.

Going beyond online graphing widgets are tools like Autodesk, which is a poor man's web based version of AutoCAD. In addition to its vector drawing tools, it has some data analysis tools and can generate vector driven charts from disparate sources; this one is primarily useful for engineers, who want something that extends on a metaphor of usability they already understand from drafting tools.

One of the most common uses of professional design software is to make organizational charts, and flowcharts. Vizio is the Microsoft tool for this, and people use it for things far beyond its intent.

Others try to use things like Photoshop or Illustrator for this purpose, and while they can do it, it is sort of like using an F-15 to pick up the groceries. Given that most organizational charts tend to be short lived anyway, there is a lot to be said for putting them in an open format that anyone can access on the web, and edit and modify.

When it comes to creating data visualizations to convey information, not all the spiffy tools in the world will help unless you have some sense of both statistical and numerative methods and online graphic design.

It is easy to make online charts that mislead; the comparison of different sizes of a dollar bill to show declining purchasing power is one of the classic examples, and most pie charts are useless – putting a bunch of usually unrelated data together to show percentages adding up to 100%.

If you want to go beyond making an online graph for a presentation to making a graph that will persuade, the book to check out is Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Graphics Press. It is likely available in your local library, and is, for someone who does business graphics, something that should be read and reviewed once or twice a year.

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