Comments on: How do I get started with data visualization?

Question: How do I get started with data visualization?

icarus — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:41:31 -0800

I'd like to figure out how to do good looking data visualization for reports beyond Excel charts, but without any coding/programming skills except xhtml/css.

Bonus points for also listing some data visualization techniques or websites that you find useful, attractive, user friendly, etc.

By: Tapioca

Tapioca — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:07:03 -0800

Edward Tufte writes great books on data visualization. The Visual Display of Quantitative INformation could be worth a library visit.

By: icarus

icarus — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:23:13 -0800

I'll definitely check it out! Thanks!

By: azlondon

azlondon — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:29:35 -0800

You may find some inspiration at gapminder or many eyes. The Google visualization gallery has some embeddable widgets that you can link up with spreadsheet data.

By: b33j

b33j — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:33:23 -0800

These guys.

By: icarus

icarus — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:56:21 -0800

Infosthetics is pretty mindblowing.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:05:50 -0800

Seconding a serious read of Tufte. I used to do infographics for reports at my previous job and I garnered a lot of insight from his books. It dovetailed nicely with my graphic design training, as I went through school during a time when the importance of the information being presented was first and foremost.

By: djb

djb — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:14:06 -0800

Create Image-less Graphics And Charts just popped up in my RSS feeds. Includes modified sparklines (a Tufte favorite) with just CSS.

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:38:07 -0800

A friend just used this web app to do some cool charting. Google has a simple charting API. It looks pretty simple.

By: brennen

brennen — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:42:50 -0800

You can get some pretty neat stuff out of Graphviz without too much in the way of coding skills.

By: oostevo

oostevo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:12:32 -0800

Another website: Junk Charts mostly deals with what to avoid in data visualization, but it's still pretty interesting. From time to time, they have some pretty stunning charts and graphs too.

Also, I know you didn't want anything to do with programming, but if you have any programming experience at all, you should check out Processing. It's way easier than it looks. It's definitely worth it to spend 15 minutes downloading it and looking through the example code if you're interested in data-viz.

By: [user was fined for this post]

[user was fined for this post] — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:24:55 -0800

I'm not sure if you're looking for a more hands-on approach than this, but widgenie takes your data and creates nice-looking (but fairly business-oriented) visualizations that can be embedded in your own site.

Most of these require a small amount of programming, but you may find something useful there.

By: Smarson

Smarson — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:28:21 -0800

Hands down, Tableau.

Think sexy complicated charts/graphs meets drag and drop ease of use and functionality. No programming necessary. Best of all they have free trials. Seriously, this stuff is genius.