Free Online Chart Tools

Data visualization is becoming an increasingly popular way to convey information. Infographics, as discussed in the last blog post can be a fun and even elegant way to express data in a visual manner, but old-fashioned charts can also be effective.

This past year, I have been teaching Excel to undergraduate students, and have found myself using spreadsheets more and more outside of teaching, as I gain a greater appreciation for the tool through my teaching. For example, spreadsheets have served me well when breaking down budgets for grant applications, and for making Gantt Charts to map my dissertation schedule.

Although I teach Excel to students in a direct way, the skills behind spreadsheets and chart-creation can be an effective way to get students to synthesize data and think critically about ways in which they can convey important information while discarding the excess in order to make a point or substantiate an argument. Maybe History students can put a bar chart in a paper comparing the numbers between Loyalists and Royalists during the Revolutionary War, or a pie chart breaking down the percentages of weapon types among the two factions. Those studying Music can create a line chart of the rise of opera across European countries. And students of Francophone literature may use a visualization to compare novel publication numbers in Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.

Microsoft Excel is the obvious spreadsheet program, with Apache OpenOffice's or LibreOffice's Calc as open source options, and Google Sheets as an online and free alternative. Here are two much more simplified free and online tools that you can use in a classroom without downloading anything or opening an account:

Datawrapper

This open source web-based chart and map tool is available for use for free, with the option for pay-based upgrades. The interface is very user-friendly, and allows you to paste data directly into a box, or upload a csv file. Although this latter option would suggest that the tool can work well with a large amount of data, Datawrapper was not actually that robust and failed for me when I tried to upload a NYC OpenData csv file of the trees of Manhattan:

Still, it is a nice and clean interface and could work well with data that is simplified prior to import (which may make for a nice scaffolded assignment for students).

charts.livegap.com

What is nice about this tool is that it is ready to play with as soon as you visit the site, bringing you directly to a spreadsheet and chart that you can start to manipulate (as in the image above). Students can use this to experiment directly while watching the chart shift as they input new or different data sets.

Like Datawrapper, charts.livegap.com is not as robust as other spreadsheet tools, with no obvious calculation functionality.  It is a little less intuitive than Datawrapper, and also behaves a bit unexpectedly when you leave null values (instead, you should input a 0 to hold that cell's place in an array).

In the Fellini chart I was working on, below, the range of data from 3-11 was too great for charts.livegap.com to handle, and the number 3 was not visualized in the bar chart:

Despite shortcomings, these free web-based tools can prove to convey to students the importance of simplifying effective data when forming an argument. Incorporating charts and spreadsheets into traditional humanities classrooms can help students to think about their studies in a quantitative manner and help them to connect their learning across fields.