LibGuides: Data Visualization: Visualization Tools

Overview

Selecting the right tool for data visualization often depends on the data type in question and the user's comfort level with coding. Fortunately, there are many options! While this list isn't a complete accounting of all data visualization tools/software available (see this GitHub page for a more exhaustive coverage of visualization software/libraries), it can provide a starting point.

Point and click options

There are a variety of reasons you may prefer a point-and-click interface for making data visualizations. The main issue to consider is what type of data you are working with, as many tools are specialized to work with certain data formats.

If your data is: mostly or all numeric (e.g., gross domestic product over time, species counts, coded survey data, etc.)

Excel
Excel remains a frequently used platform for exploratory (and explanatory) data visualization, especially for those in business, marketing, economics, and finance. This guide from Duke University Libraries provides an introduction to the visualization capabilities of Excel.
Tableau
Tableau works with numeric and categorical data to produce advanced graphics. Browse the Tableau public gallery to see examples of visuals and dashboards. The Datacruncher machine in the Data & GIS Lab has a Tableau license and a trial version of Tableau is available for download from the website.
RAW Graphs
RAW Graphs is an online platform to make data visualizations.The interface allows users to select graph type (i.e., scatterplot, bar chart, dendrogram, etc.) based on type of input data (i.e., numeric, categorical).
Datawrapper
Datawrapper is a free online platform to create PNG charts and maps with no coding required. The available customization makes professional-quality visualizations.
plotly
Plotly is an entirely web-based interface for making graphics. It does not require any coding knowledge, but can interface with both R and Python. The community version of plotly is free to use.
Gephi
Gephi is a free software for visualizing networks, comprised of "nodes" and "edges". The main website hosts official tutorials and also links to popular community-developed tutorials.
Platform-specific tools
Some websites/organizations that host data available for analysis also include visualization tools specifically for that data. This guide from George Mason University covers selected platform-specific visualization tools (i.e., Data-Planet, Social Explorer, SimplyAnalytics).

If your data is: raw text (e.g., newspaper articles, journal articles, any literature)

Voyant
Voyant is an online point-and-click tool for text analysis. While the default graphics are impressive, it allows limited customizing of analysis and graphs and may be most useful for exploratory visualization.
Corpus-specific tools
Certain corpora have built-in visualization tools, such as Google Books ngram viewer, HathiTrust Bookworm, or JSTOR for Research.

If you want general purpose templates:

Canva
Canva is a an online graphic design platform. Users can start from a variety of templates, including for infographics.

Coding options

If you are working with a scripting language for other aspects of data analysis, you're in luck! You can often use the same software for everything from data cleaning to data visualization for both numeric and text data.

R
R is not only a standard statistical analysis tool, but also a powerful visualization platform. The ggplot2 package is the primary graphic-making package. There are also numerous packages meant to extend the functionality of ggplot2. From animations to maps to other advanced graphic options (check out shiny to make interactive plots!), these extension packages help make publication-worthy graphs. For those working with text data, the tidytext and tm packages are good options for cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing text data.
Python
Like R, Python has libraries to make impressive visualizations. While matplotlib is the main graphics library, there are additional Python libraries focused on visualization, including making interactive plots/charts, 3D images, maps, and more. (Read here for a more in-depth discussion of how the Python visualization libraries fit together.) When working with text data, the nltk and TextBlob libraries are useful for analysis and visualization.

Geospatial or image data

If your data is: geospatial (vector, raster)

The GIS Librarian is here to help you with your geospatial data questions! Additionally, the computers in the Data & GIS Lab are equipped with ArcGIS and QGIS, and available for use.

If your data is: images (video, picture)

The Digital Media Lab in Geisel is equipped with state of the art machines and software to help with image processing, manipulating editing, and more.