![]() Also, there is no option to set the Y-Axis to Zero (if you want that, you need to include a row in your data in which you put a 0 and that you then delete in the chart). For example: Illustrator can’t do bubble charts. Let’s be precise here: The charting options in Illustrator suck. A tool that almost every Information Designer uses for static designs, daily. Google Spreadsheets CAN do bubble charts, but only with a little hack - I would have needed to change my data for it.Īh, Illustrator. Also, it’s far less complex and powerful than Excel, but “good enough” for the daily stuff I do in spreadsheets (split, unique, countif, ifelse, vlookup, max, average, median, simple math and pivot tables, because I loooove pivot tables). On a Mac at least, it just works smoother than Excel. Google Sheets is my favorite spreadsheet app out there (so far). That said, Excel did an excellent job with the axises. The option “Vary color by point” (I had all my hope on it) gives all bubbles an individual (very colorful) color. After finally figuring out how to assign columns to axises, I couldn’t find a way to make the bubbles feel NOT like one big black merged cheese hole something. It’s also responsible for the most complicated process to get to this scatterplot of all my tools. We start with the most common software to use charts. in Illustrator, I will only use the chart tool, not the thousands of design options. Some rules: I will try to reproduce that Gapminder chart as good as possible, but I won’t tweak the design more than the tool allows. Also, the statements I make about the tools and languages are only true for the dataset I chose and definitely influenced by my past experience with the tool. ![]() Please be aware that I will only use tools and programming languages that make sense for my data and not networking tools like Gephi. Also, we want the x-axis to start at 0 and be log-scaled. I chose that visualization form over a simple bar chart for multiple reasons: Setting the size of the bubble will show which tools are more advanced. Some tools call that a scatterplot, some call it a bubble chart. And the size of the bubbles will represent the population of the country. On the y-axis, I will put the health expectancy in years (“health”). I will try to visualize the data in the same form Gapminder does: On the x-axis, I want the GDP per capita (“income”). Here’s a Google Spreadsheet with the data: I will use a dataset that contains the health expectancy in years, GDP per capita and population for 187 countries in 2015, provided by Gapminder. If they are important tools I missed, or if I missed some features in a tool or a better way to get to the bubble chart, or if I’m wrong about a thing or two, or if you completely disagree with my opinion about these tools (which, I’m sure, will happen): Let me know on Twitter or via email The Data & the Visualization Form To do that, I took the same dataset and visualized it with 12 different tools (this post) and 12 different charting libraries (next post). I wanted to get to know as many options to visualize data as possible. That’s what this post and the next post is about. I think it can’t hurt to have a wider view of the options out there: To maybe discover better tools than the ones we use but also to reassure us that the tools we use ARE really the best (so far). Often we keep working with the first not-entirely-bad tool or language that we encountered. Which tool or charting framework do you use to visualize data? Everybody I’ve met so far has personal preferences (“I got introduced to data vis with that tool!”, “My hero uses that tool and she makes the best charts!”). Edit June 2017: Added the Datawrapper version of the bubble chart. ![]() Edit May 2016: Corrected false information about Adobe Illustrator and Tableau Public.
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