In the world of Data, data visualization tools and technologies are essential to analyze massive amounts of information and make data-driven decisions.
Our eyes are drawn to colors and patterns. We can quickly identify red from blue, square from circle. Our culture is visual, including everything from art and advertisements to movies.
What is Data Visualization Software?
Data Visualization Software is an increasingly key tool to make sense of the trillions of rows of data generated every day. Data visualization helps to tell stories by curating data into a form easier to understand, highlighting the trends and outliers. It is the graphical representation of information and data. By using visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data.
In business settings, data visualization tools can help visualize all the data generated by business processes, and create dashboards to keep track of pretty much everything.
Data visualization types
Common general types of data visualization:
- Charts
- Tables
- Graphs
- Maps
- Infographics
- Dashboards
More specific examples of methods to visualize data:
- Area Chart
- Bar Chart
- Box-and-whisker Plots
- Bubble Cloud
- Bullet Graph
- Cartogram
- Circle View
- Dot Distribution Map
- Gantt Chart
- Heat Map
- Highlight Table
- Histogram
- Matrix
- Network
- Polar Area
- Radial Tree
- Scatter Plot
- Streamgraph
- Text Tables
- Timeline
- Treemap
- Wedge Stack Graph
- Word Cloud
- And any mix-and-match combination in a dashboard
Data visualization software tools
These data visualization software tools can then be used to create dashboards, annual reports, sales and marketing analysis, investor slide decks, etc.
1.Tableau
Tableau is one of the most recognized business information data visualization software tools. Tableau has a variety of options available, including a desktop app, server and hosted online versions, and a free public option. There are hundreds of data import options available, from CSV files to Google Ads and Analytics data to Salesforce data. Output options include multiple chart formats as well as mapping capability. That means users can create color-coded maps that showcase geographically important data in a format that’s much easier to digest.
2.Infogram
Infogram is a fully-featured drag-and-drop visualization tool that creates effective visualizations of data for marketing reports, infographics, social media posts, maps, dashboards, and more. Finished visualizations can be exported into a number of formats: .PNG, .JPG, .GIF, .PDF, and .HTML. Interactive visualizations are also possible, perfect for embedding into websites or apps. Infogram also offers a WordPress plugin that makes embedding visualizations even easier for WordPress users.
ChartBlocks
ChartBlocks claims that data can be imported from “anywhere” using their API, including from live feeds. The app allows for extensive customization of the final visualization created, and the chart building wizard helps users pick exactly the right data for their charts before importing the data. Users can create virtually any kind of chart, and the output is responsive.Datawrapper
DataWrapper is a data visualization tool for creating charts, maps and tables. All charts created with DataWrapper are mobile responsive — the visualizations adjust to different screen sizes by minimizing lines and shrinking empty spaces. Once data is imported, charts can be created with a single click. Their visualization types include column, line, and bar charts, election donuts, area charts, scatter plots, choropleth and symbol maps, and locator maps, among others. The charts can also be shared or printed easily.FusionCharts
FusionCharts is another JavaScript-based option for creating web and mobile dashboards. It includes over 150 chart types and 1,000 map types. It can integrate with popular JS frameworks as well as with server-side programming languages.Sigmajs
Sigmajs is a single-purpose visualization tool for creating network graphs. It’s highly customizable but does require some basic JavaScript knowledge in order to use. Graphs created are embeddable, interactive, and responsive.Polymaps
Polymaps is a dedicated JavaScript library for mapping. The outputs are dynamic, responsive maps in a variety of styles, from image overlays to symbol maps to density maps. It uses SVG to create the images, so users can use CSS to customize the visuals of their maps.Visme
Using a full set of tools, including a graph maker, chart templates and a data widget library, you can easily create data visualizations of different types. Visme integrates business intelligence with interactive design to help you create data visualizations that are not only easy to read and understand, but also look stunning. Visme’s graph maker has the power to easily create line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, histograms and many more chart styles. The data widgets in Visme are perfect for visualizing map data, arrays, tables, percentages, gauges and more.Whatagraph
Whatagraph is a data visualization tool that offers visual data analytics for social media, PPC, SEO and email campaigns. The visual analytics are created from a number of different integrations, spanning from Twitter to Google Analytics. The Whatagraph data visualizations can also be customized to match your brand with white label templates.Sisense
Sisense is a business intelligence tool for creating data visualizations that help gain business insights. Sisense is for creating dashboards. This data visualization tool is specially created to visualize large amounts of data. The dashboards can be created in any way the user wants according to the data they need to analyze.DataBox
This data visualization tool has a DIY dashboard creator with integrations for many data sources. Plus, it offers plenty of templates to choose from. DataBox is exclusively for creating dashboards and analytics apps for mobile and desktop.Xplenty
Xplenty is a cloud-based data integration platform that prepares data for your data visualization software. It can integrate data from more than 100 data stores and SaaS applications. Xplenty’s native connectors will make it easy to configure pulling or pushing data from the popular data sources on the public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise infrastructure. It has connectors for databases, applications, data warehouses, etc.
I hope you found this article useful, if you need any help with your data visualization project, let us know! We are experts in data science!