You Ask, I Answer: Best Simple Data Visualization Tools?

In today's episode, Mike asks, my former partner slash creative directors looking for a lame and accessible tool for doing cool animations with simple data sets. Think Hans Rosling. Do you know any tools or people who can make information beautiful? So if you're looking for a really basic tool that can just do some fun animations, probably one of the ones that uh I think is is very much overlooked is Google's Data GIF Maker, which is part of their Google News Lab. They have this whole lab for uh helping journalists and creators and uh investigators do more with their information.

And uh Data GIF Maker is one of them. So let's bring this up here. What you see here is the data gift maker interface. Very, very straightforward. A couple of different items, and you can make some animations out of this.

So let's go ahead and try this. Go click on circles here. And we can see this. Let's call this election day here in the US as I'm doing this. Uh let's do a voting illustration.

Let's do uh change this one first one here to red. People who vote, I'll call that five. And people who uh complain on Facebook, call it 100. And people who run for office. Call that one.

And you can take a look at the different themes. There's the three different themes here. Let's go ahead and preview this. And you can see it now makes a uh a nice little illustration there that you can then take that uh animated GIF and save it and put it into a PowerPoint. So that's a really good example of a very simple tool that allows you to illustrate a very, very simple data set and turn it into something uh that is animated that that's a little bit of fun to play with.

If you want something that can connect and process um slightly more advanced data sets, uh the tool that you're probably gonna want to look at is called Google Data uh Data Studio. Data Studio is a visualization tool that connects to many popular data sources and allows you to um to construct your own dashboards. So let's go ahead and take this out of uh edit mode here. Oh, it is in edit mode. Whoops.

And what you can do is hover over and and see somewhat interactively different types of information. Now, this is not animated, this is not you know fancy flashy uh stuff, but it is easy for the layman. It you know, when you when I pop in into edit mode here, you can see it looks very much like a uh uh a Google Sheet or uh Google Docs or things like that. Um, some very basic charts, some um different shapes and stuff, and it's something that again a layperson could probably figure out pretty easily. Now, if you want to do advanced stuff, if you want to do the stuff that does look um very high end, uh the tool probably to do that would be Tableau, and that is less accessible to the layman.

It does require you to uh invest some time uh in in learning it, but Tableau is a just an incredibly powerful piece of software for uh visualizing information, then publishing it to the web, making animations, uh making illustrations, making interactives. Uh it is what um many, many folks in the journalism world use. Uh they have data illustration departments at places like the New York Times. And then finally, at the very, very highest end are custom code uh things, which are uh using uh R or Python and libraries like Plotly or Google Charts to make incredibly interactive, very high-end animations. You see this with the B VC, uh, you see this with things like Vice and The Verge.

Uh those are not accessible to the layman. Uh you need to be able to code, you need to be able to do data visualization with them. But those are I think four good tools on the spectrum from very simple to the most complex when it comes to doing data visualization. I would definitely take a look at the data gift maker. There are a bunch of paid tools out there.

I have not evaluated most of them, so I can't speak as to how simple or easy or not easy they are to use for making animations. The other thing I would take a look at is uh look at uh Tech Smith Snagit. Um I did a review of this recently, and one of the things that Snaggit allows you to do is to put a series of essentially charts in uh the the bottom of a graphic here, like this, and um and then be able to animate them. So there are uh it's not you're not animating the graphics themselves, you are simply animating the um the I guess annotations if you will. So let's do a real quick example here.

Um let's do a video from images. And take this image. I'm gonna record it here. And what you'll get, of course, is a very simple animation that has those annotations on it. Kind of silly, but fun.

And of course you can turn that into a GIF as well. Those are uh snag it is is not free. Um I'll put a link in the show notes. If you go to trustinsights.ai slash uh snag it, you can uh get a uh copy with a I think there's a small a small discount running right now. Um because the new version just came up.

But that's an option as well. If you're just looking to do the annotation, the animation of the graphic itself, um that would be an option for you to look at as well. So lots of different tools, lots of different options depending on your use case. I would say talk to the person who's doing this and try to get a sense for what the use case is and what it is they want to animate, and then make your tool decision based on that. Um but a good question, a very common question, uh, and there's a lot of fun stuff out there that you can play with.

So good luck with that. Uh leave your follow-up questions in the comments box below. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.