Creating a graph to put on a website
I have some data. Not much. Just two rows and a few colums and I want to make a beautiful graph, turn it into a web-friendly image and put it on this blog.
How hard can that be? It turns out, way harder than it should be. One word aarrrgghh
Here’s what I did
The data is the number of pages on the internet as advertised on the Google homepage
| Date | 10/11/00 | 10/11/1 | 23/5/2 | 12/11/2 | 18/11/3 | 21/11/3 | 12/5/4 | 11/11/4 | 1/1/7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. Pages (Bns) | 1.25 | 1.61 | 2.07 | 3.08 | 3.31 | 3.08 | 4.29 | 8.06 | 20* |
* this one is a guess as they stopped publishing the numbers in sept 05 (8.1bn)
Open Office
First up - I tried to generate a chart using Open Office - I’m a Mac user and I don’t have Excel installed as it’s not great on the Mac. My approach was to save as html and go and find the jpg/png that is generated.
Here is the output for open office
One word: BLURRY. And I saved this as the highest quality I could.
Time: That took me about 30 minutes once I had uploaded it to wordpress and previewed etc. Also, the scale on the x axis did not work properly (the gap between 04 and 07 looks way too smail), but I can fix that in the application.
Verdict: 2/10 (once i fixed the x axis issue)
Excel
Next up was Excel - I used one of the other machines in the office which runs XP (SP2) and Excel 2000. Same data. Same approach. Different result
One other word - DARK
Time: about 25 mins including getting the data onto the XP machine
Verdict: 0/10 Unusable
Google Docs
What about the promise that is Google Spreadsheets I hear you cry (I have good ears)
The approach was a little different. Once I created the chart which is called a ‘Gadget’ in Google docs, I ‘published’ it and they gave me a piece of code to put into my page. Not that difficult, but of course the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor didn’t like it so I’m forced into editing html directly which is OK for me as I’m down on that stuff, but it’s not accessilbe for non-html folks.
There were several issues with this one. The biggest was that there are very few layout controls. Look at the dates - there’s no way to fix that. The title has disappeared and we have the same x axis scale problem as the Open Office chart but unlike OO, with Google Docs there is no way to fix it.
Time: 30 minutes a lot of which was spent cleaning up Wordpress-inserted html
Verdict: 1/10 quite pretty, but not very good and the html issue was a pain
(would have been 2/10, but I just found out that as the graph is stored by Google and linked with the scipt, it doesn’t show up in the RSS feed which sucks)
What about some online app that could generate a flash file? That thought flashed through my head and I let it fly away without trying to stop it and find out more. Bad idea - just a bad idea.
So what do I do?
I get frustrated. I speak to our designer who says she can do it in Illustrator. Illustrator?? This is data!
Not a good use of her time.
Then another colleague suggested taking a screenshot of the Open Office or Excel Version. For some reason that felt all wrong. I had the same feeling I used to get when I taped the top 40 off radio 1 with my radio/cassette player on a Sunday evening 20 years ago.
But, you know, it worked.
The chart is actually a screenshot of the Open Office graph taken with my trusty Mac.
Time: 5 mins plus the original 30
Verdict: 5/10. OK, but not very C21.
[...] Original post by Giles Palmer [...]
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