Please help me create charts to analyse my self-tacking data.

July 19, 2010 3:15 PM

How do I chart my life? I'm using an Android App to input information against a date/time such as weight/mood/alertness/alcohol units etc. How can I easily view all this data on a big chart so I can see what relationships might exist?

The android app (keeptrack) is great and I'm not finding it a problem at all to input the data but reporting in a meaningful way is proving really difficult.

The data exports as a delimited text file in the format below....watches are what the program calls the things I'm tracking.

Watches

Alcohol units
12/07/2010 23:48 7
13/07/2010 16:49 3
14/07/2010 23:58 4
15/07/2010 22:51 1
16/07/2010 23:10 5

Mood
12/07/2010 22:42 2
13/07/2010 18:50 5
14/07/2010 20:40 3
15/07/2010 21:32 3
16/07/2010 23:18 4

How can I chuck in multiple types of 'watches' with multiple dates/scores into a program and get it to graph it all on the same chart?
I would want as many as 9 or 10 different 'watches'. Then I could see, as an example, if alcohol units on 1 day led to stress problems the next day and see how this was related to hours slept.
I've tried to use excel but find adding the second series problematic. I'm happy to learn what to do but can't understand the terminology to search for a tutorial and don't really want to have to learn everything about excel charts. I would much prefer an offline app but could bring myself to use an online app if necessary.

posted by razzman to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

your.flowingdata.com. Works through twitter.
posted by adamrice at 3:33 PM on July 19, 2010

if you aren't afraid of using a command line program then R can make elegant figures with just a few lines of code.
posted by special-k at 3:39 PM on July 19, 2010

This is overkill, but R is a fabulous free statistical package which produces very nice graphs. Many tutorials and code snippets are available online but the learning curve can be quite steep depending on your experience.

Your project made me think of the scatterplot matrices about halfway down this page:
http://www.statmethods.net/graphs/scatterplot.html

If that looks like what you are hoping to accomplish, you can get R here:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
posted by esoterrica at 3:42 PM on July 19, 2010

Perhaps SIMILE Timeplot? You'd have to view the graphs though a web-browser, but wouldn't need internet access or a web server.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 9:42 AM on July 20, 2010

Thanks for the answers so far. I am a bit removed from programming these days and had naively hoped that there may be a magic solution for this problem. I'm sure there will be an easy solution within the next year or two as this kind of tracking becomes more possible/popular. I'm surprised Excel can't do it. Google Charts looks really promising but is still way too complicated for me! Maybe someone else may have luck there.
posted by razzman at 3:24 PM on July 20, 2010

Just in case anybody comes back to this thread - after asking the developer of keeptrack they seem to have incorporated the ability within the app. I still can't do it with excel, but the app is very handy for looking for relationships between 'watches'.
posted by razzman at 2:59 PM on March 10, 2011