What is a good platform (environment/language/reuseable component) for data visualization?

Question

I have lots and lots of data in various structures. Are there any better platforms other than Excel charts which can help me.

Answer 1

A starting point

The field of data visualisation is growing rapidly at the moment. Traditional toolchains such as Microsoft Excel were augmented by powerful visualisation solutions as part of the dashboarding craze that came with the last wave of ERPs. We're even more spoiled now as the programming community has joined with traditional analytics to explore java, javascript, and any language you can think of.

The story gets even better with open source and cloud-based solutions. Keeping up is hard work, but I've found some great jump-off points in a recent round of research. If you take an evening to take a few minutes with each of the tools listed in this great Computer World article, you will surely find one that immediately appeals to your preferences and skills.

22 Free Tools for Data Visualization and Analysis

If this is a little much to digest in one sitting, take a glance over the handy chart first to get an overview of some of what is out there.

Bonus

A great one not on that list is d3.js, which is a currently maintained successor to the protovis project, which I believe is no longer active. You can find d3.js on github, which again shows how lucky we are to have such great community efforts in open sourcing these kinds of powerful visualisation solutions.

Answer 2

Tale a look at R. It has a strong community and ecosystem. If you enjoy working from a console, you'll probably enjoy how easy it is to go from a CSV, for example, to various data visualizations.

I found this interactive tutorial from Code School to be very helpful in getting started.

Answer 3

Depends a bit what your objectives are and how technical you are willing to get.

Incanter is a great toolset that I can heartily recommend (I use it for visualisation in my own projects). It's a statistical computing and visualisation library for Clojure - which in turn is a very flexible and dynamic langauge, good for interactive experiements.

I particularly like the DSL for creating charts, e.g. to create a histogram of 1000 samples from the normal distribution you can just do:

(view (histogram (sample-normal 1000)))

Answer 4

What about google charts?