I was talking with a co-worker recently about data visualization, and he showed me a site he ran across with the latest and greatest in Graphing. D3 (Data Driven Documents) has some pretty amazing ways to chart data – check out the gallery of examples here.
In playing around with these charts, this looks to be quite a step up from Google Visualization charts. The JavaScript coding to load the charts looks pretty similar to Googles approach, so it should be pretty easy to migrate to this new D3 library.
One drawback to both D3 and Google Visualization charts is that they are JavaScript based, so they only run in a browser. I am still looking for a decent solution for emailing charts. While there are a few paid libraries that will render images, I still haven’t a library to replace the Google Image Charts that Google officially deprecated in 2012. Google Image charts still work, but Google may pull the plug on those at any time. One final note regarding emailing charts – to date I have been able to skirt the issue, because when I want to send an email with a chart – the better approach is to send an email telling the recipient to log in and view the data on their website. This has the advantage of driving traffic to your website, and easily capturing info as to if your recipient actually viewed the chart. So maybe it is just a bad practice to embed full data visualizations in emails.
With all the expansion of data we have seen over the last few years, its nice to see display technologies keeping up. Now the hard part is in trying to figure out which kind of chart to use when displaying data – perhaps we have too many options.