Here it is a comparison among different ways of making bar charts and embedding them in a wordpress blog. I’ve testing them for kulturometer.org, a project devoted to research the cultural budget that the city of Madrid is spending.
The data used: Once a year the Madrid city hall publishes a pdf with these data in a non reusable format. We’ve been extracting manually these numbers in the last 5 years and published them in a google spreadsheet (see the data set in csv format at the end of this post).
The idea of this post is to compare and review these 4 5 different methods.
Update: added gnumeric after Madeleine comment. It’s the simplest and more customizable method (though not intractive).
Google Spreadsheets
Advantages
Easy to upload data, and collaborate with others.
Easy to generate simple bar charts and embed them as images (as interactive script you may have some problems when embeding in a blog ).
No programming skills needed.
Drawbacks
Even now, that it is possible to customize a lot of the visualization, it is still not possible to change bar height (or width), for example.
Libre Office -> Inkscape
Advantages
- No programming skills needed.
- High customization possibilities.
- Produces .svg code or .png images.
Drawbacks
- Need basic inkscape knowledge.
D3
Advantages
High customization possibilities.
Produces .svg code ready for the web.
(Interactive possibilities, I haven’t explored them yet).
Drawbacks
Javascript knowledge needed.
Processing
Advantages
High design and interaction customization possibilities.
Produces .svg code ready for the web.
Drawbacks
Processing knowledge needed.
You’ll need to export it with Processing.js, that makes your visualization work using web standards and without any plug-ins.
Gnumeric
Advantages
No extra program needed.
Highly customizable: colors, ticks in axes, units, fonts.
Produces clean .svg
Drawbacks
No interactive graphic.