We’ve covered lots of chart generators here at MUO, including online apps like Pie Color and Chart Tool. We even once covered Google’s Image Chart Creator, which I’m pretty sure was a predecessor to Google Fusion Tables. The beauty of Google Fusion Tables is that it takes chart creation to a more automated level, by letting you import spreadsheets from right inside of Google Docs. You can also import data from a file stored on your computer, or create it on-the-fly.

Access Google Fusion Tables From Inside Google Docs

The first step is to log into your Google Docs account, and then click on the “Create” button on the left side of the main screen. You’ll see a dropdown list of all of the typical things you can create in Google Docs, like documents and spreadsheets. If you look a little further down that list, you’ll see a selection for “Table“. Currently this is a beta feature.

The first option you’ll have is to import your table of data. As you can see, you can simply use a spreadsheet that you already have in your Google Docs account (Google Spreadsheets), or you can upload a spreadsheet data file from your computer.

For the purposes of this article, I want to show you how you can use Google Fusion Tables to display real data onto a map. In this case, I’m going to create a list of the trips our family has taken through the years, and I’m going to rate each trip with a “like” value – from 0 percent to 100 percent.

When you create a new empty table, you can enter in the data one row at a time. It isn’t quite like a regular spreadsheet where there are a bunch of empty rows. You have to click on the “Create New Row” button to enter in new data.

Text and Number can be anything at all. Location is optional, unless you want to represent the data in a map format, in which case you’ll want to connect that data to a specific location that will show up on a Google Map. You can also add a date, which can come in handy as well depending on what you are trying to represent, but that too is optional.

Here is my completed table, with five places we’ve visited and a number representing how much we liked the trip.

When you’re ready to convert your data sheet into a graphical format, just click on the “Visualize” menu item and select one of the options from the list. You can represent the data as a line chart, bar chart, pie chart, scatter plot or a timeline.

Of course, my favorite feature of Google Fusion Tables is the ability to overlay data on top of a Google Map. When you select the Map option, there are a few additional steps you can go through to customize your data visualization.

Right now, there really isn’t anything special about the data points, except that they are plotted on the map based on the locations that I provided for those data points. Instead of this, I want to make the map more useful by changing the actual marker itself based on the “like” percentage that I gave that trip. Just click on “configure styles” at the top of the map. Click on “Buckets” and then divide the data points into ranges of values. In this case I want 5 different icons that represent ranges of rating points.

Don’t forget to select what data you are representing by identifying the data column in the dropdown list. In this case I chose the “Number” column of my table. Now, you can see that the icons display in the size and color relating to the “weight” that I gave that trip.

Obviously, this can become far more useful when you have hundreds or thousands of data points, and you divide the icons into very fine-tuned buckets. Doing this, you can represent information such as illnesses, accidents, natural disasters and other data in a way that could reveal information that’s otherwise hard to visualize in just a table format.

Of course, you can also use Google Fusion charts to represent data in your standard pie, line or bar chart formats – the sort of everyday charting that you may do at work or school.

The best part of Google Fusion Tables is that the visualizations you create can be embedded anywhere on the web. All you have to do is make your original table “public”, and then in the map display, click on the “Get embeddable link“. This will provide code you can highlight and then paste on your own blog or website.

The other charts are also embeddable in the same way.

Google Fusion Tables makes it ridiculously fast and easy to import huge volumes of data and then represent that information in a graphical format that might otherwise have taken you much longer to accomplish using an application like Microsoft Excel. Google Fusion Tables lets you quickly identify the exact data you want to represent, how you want to display it, and then takes care of the rest – and lets you share your visualizations quickly on the web.

So go ahead, log into your Google Docs account and give Google Fusion Tables a try. Let us know if it helped you analyze your data in a new way. Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Charts often make decision making easy. They’re a nice change from staring at rows and columns of numbers. They add some style and pizazz to your documents or presentations. Creating charts in Excel seems complicated, so you end up settling for simple charts which require a lot of work to maintain.

In my full time job, charts help shorten the decision making process, as we can immediately see our results and where changes need to be made. The difficulty in handling data and charting it is you constantly have to go back to the chart and update it for new data.

Well, no more! I want to show you three easy steps to creating charts in Excel that self-update. All you’ll have to do is add data to the spreadsheet and the chart will automatically graph it. You won’t have to depend on others to manipulate or mess up the chart and you won’t have to do all that extra work either. You don’t need any Visual Basic skills, but you do need to understand the basic fundamentals of Excel charts.

To walk you through the process, I have created a fictional pet store called “Paws n’ Fangs“ and I have begun an Excel workbook titled “pnfinv.xls“. Here is the October inventory of pets as of the seventeenth of the month, along with a basic chart of the dog inventory. This is the starting point and step one ““ a spreadsheet with a basic chart.

The problem is updating the chart for new daily inventory numbers. I may not want store clerks to mess with the charts and I may be tired of doing it all the time as well. I can quickly look at these charts and determine when and how many pets I need to order from my supplier, so I don’t want to abandon the use of the charts.

Step two is to name the column that I want to chart. This is done through the menu bar by clicking Insert>Name>Define. When the “Define Name“ window pops up, we start by clicking inside the text box under “Names in Workbook“. In this blank space, we type in the label for the column we plan to chart.

For our example, we would type in “Dogs“ exactly as it appears in the spreadsheet. Now we have defined a Name, but we have to further define what the name means.

At the bottom of this window is a blank area for “Refers to:“. This is where the magic happens for our chart. In this box we use the OFFSET function. Notice the formula is “=OFFSET(Sheet1!$B$7,0,0,COUNTA(Sheet1!$B$6:$B$37)-1)“. This looks complicated, but let’s break it down.

What we have done in this formula is to define that the name “Dogs“ refers to data in Sheet1, with data starting in cell B7. The “0,0″ pinpoints to B7, as these are “Row, Column“ variables. If we used “$B$7, 1,0″ we would be referencing B8, as the “1″ in the row variable position would mean that we were referring to one row below the stated cell. In our simple example, it is much easier to directly reference the starting point of the data by using “$B$7, 0,0″.

Next, the formula counts the non-blank cells in the entire column, including the header (B6:B37) and subtracts 1 (for the header-necessary for sorting functions). Notice two important points. First, the “Sheet1″ portion of the formula is simply the name of the sheet on which the data is located. Excel’s default is Sheet1. Your charts could be in the same Excel workbook, but on a page titled “Charts”, while you may have various sheet titles such as “Oct 09 Inv”, “Nov 09 Inv”, etc. Be sure to properly reference the sheet title or you’ll have a mess on your hands.

The second point is that for our example, we have a defined number of days in the month (31), so our maximum number of entries at one per day is thirty-one. Thus, our defined range to count extends to cell B37, where the 31^st piece of data will be. You may have hundreds of data points you will eventually want to fill in and chart, or you may have a defined number. The point is to use a large enough reference so that you won’t have to go back and readjust the Names. If your spreadsheet is a defined size, simply use the maximum cell reference here.

Now we have defined the column name and the data referred to by the name “Dogs“. The third and final step is to point the chart to the name “Dogs“. This is pretty simple. Right click on the chart, and select “Source Data“. Click the “Series“ tab and in the text box beside “Values“, simply type in the name of the worksheet and the name of the range in this format – “=workbook name!RangeName“, which for our example will end up as “=pnfinv.xls!Dogs“. The workbook name is used here instead of the sheet name, as the Defined Names from step one are rooted to the workbook.

Click “OK“ and the chart will now self-update! We can test this by entering more data for the next several days. If the syntax of your formulas was entered correctly, your charts should update before your eyes! No more clicking and dragging cell reference outlines all over the place every time you add a piece of data to your spreadsheet. You don’t necessarily have to create a chart to begin with. You can wait until after you have defined a Name, and then begin the charting process.

Finally, for all the other pets in my imaginary store I can go back through the simple three step process and work on creating self-updating charts in Excel  for my entire inventory.

For other tips, tricks and cool free charting applications check out the MUO Charts tag directory and also check out the Excel tag for more Excel posts.

In most large corporations, you’ll use professional CAD software, or in smaller companies you may use flowchart software like Visio that aren’t free. But for the individual who’s looking for a high-quality, free alternative there really aren’t a lot of good options.

There are a few that come close, like LucidChart or DIA, the open source alternative to Visio that Karl recently covered. Then of course there are the multitude of mind-mapping apps out there that Kaly and other writers here have covered. However, what I want to share with MakeUseOf readers today is an impressive, professional quality flowchart/mind-mapping application loaded with professional clip-art, images and templates that makes it on par with, or even better than, much of the desktop flowchart software out there. It’s aptly located at Flowchart.com, and that’s also the name of the online application.

It is currently in beta, but you can get a free invite just by submitting your email. The invite came back for me in under a couple of hours. Right now it’s unknown if there’s going to be a scaled down free version of this software, but let’s hope so! Let’s take a closer look at this impressive, online flowchart software.

Don’t Start From Scratch – Use a Template

The first thing you’ll notice when you start up Flowchart.com is that when you start a new flowchart, you’re offered a variety of existing templates to choose from that will get you started without much effort.

As you can see, you can start out with some pretty cool templates like engineering diagrams, mind maps, subject-specific flowcharts, and more.  For the sake of this review, I started out with a blank template. The first thing I noticed was that to the left there are lots of clip-arts and even industry standard symbols to choose from.

There are three areas of the flowchart software that I’d like to point out that you’ll find at the upper left of the application window. In the upper left window, you’ll find the standard symbols, shapes and clip-art organized in easy-to-find subfolders. As you click on a subfolder that that contains the images, you’ll see those displayed in thumbnails in the window below. As you draw your chart in the larger grid-backed design window, you’ll see your design taking shape in the small preview window show here. The large design window is very slick – you can have the images you create “snap to grid” or now, and adding symbols is as easy as grabbing them from the left library and sliding them over to your design area. As an example I’ve designed the start of a diagram for a vacuum pumping system.

As you can see here, when you add a symbol to the design area, you can rotate it and place it wherever you like. In addition, if you click the “M” symbol, you can write a caption for the object as well.

Flowchart.com Features and Limitations

Keep in mind that this software is in beta, so you’re bound to find bugs. I find a few minor ones where the pop-up description for some menu items didn’t always work. You can report those bugs by clicking on the “forums” icon in the upper right corner of the application (the conversation icon).

Below this area, you’ll also find the design toolbar where you can draw your own images from scratch using all of the basic shapes you’d expect to find in any drawing application.

Other features offered at the top toolbar – from left to right in the image above – include snap to grid, show/hide rulers, properties & history, preview, script editor, sharing properties, view recorded charts and record charts. One of the coolest features of Flowchart.com is the fact that it’s not only flowchart software, but it’s a collaborative one at that.

When you click on the sharing icon, you’ll be able to get the url for your online flowchart, as well as manage the people allowed to access and edit that flowchart. Finally, when you’re done with your flowchart design, it’ll obviously save in the system as an online flowchart. However, what good is such flowchart software if you can’t store your charts offline and use them elsewhere? To this end, Flowcharts.com offers the ability to export to either a PNG image or a PDF file.

Here you can see the two icons to do that export in the menu bar. I’ve overlaid the actual PNG image displayed in my IrFanView application so you can get an idea of how your design will convert over. The conversion is pretty much an exact representation with your design, and I saw no quality flaws or errors with either exporting to PNG or PDF.

In my personal opinion, this application is one of the best online flowchart applications I’ve seen, however it probably runs neck-and-neck with a lot of the mindmapping apps out there, which are pretty impressive as well. I only hope that when it goes off beta that the application developers are smart enough to provide  scaled-down free version as a promotional offering – and because…well, most of us here at MUO never usually pay for software unless we absolutely have to!

Go ahead and get your invite, try it out and let us know what you think of this app in the comments section below.

Most people in the corporate world use the industry standard (and expensive) Microsoft Visio. So what do you do if you are in need of Visio but you can’t afford it or don’t want to use another Micro$oft product? Are there any free Visio alternatives?

Well I think we have a solution! I was almost shocked to find such an awesome application for the low low price of FREE! Open source is a wonderful thing and I would like to thank all the users that helped created this package – you rock!

Now let us check out DIA-  it is a 16.5 MB download from Sourceforge over here. It is also available for Linux and can probably be run on a Mac as well. If you have experience with DIA on either operating system we would love to hear from you in the comments! We will be working with the Windows version in this article.

After installing the application I launched it and was shown this screen:

At first glance it looks just like Visio with a different logo! Let’s see how it works”¦

You will see flowcharting as the default purpose of the application but with the click of a drop down menu and choosing Network we can do what I do in Visio”¦ Chart networks.

That changes our tools to be computer network related like servers and firewalls. You can see the items shown below:

Just like Visio all you need to do is drag and drop icons onto your graph paper like so”¦

Icons are easy to resize and re-orientate by simply clicking on and manipulating the icon. You can make it point in a different direction or whatever you need. Icons snap together if you wish intuitively.

You can add text labels by simply hitting tools ““ text like so:

Then click where you want to add text either inside an icon or outside like so:

Really anything you can do in Visio you can do in DIA. Why would I want to use Visio over this, seeing as it also opens all file formats that Visio does? The community goes on to say this about the product:

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

For me this free Visio alternative is wonderful! What do you use? Questions comments, death threats ? Leave them in the comments!

DIA – http://dia-installer.de/index_en.html.

Flickchart is dead-simple. It shows you two movies and you pick one over the other. It then shows you two new movies, and you pick again. If you haven’t seen one or both, you replace them with new ones. As you go on making your choices, Flickchart builds your own Top Movies list.

If you need to refresh your memory, or make sure which Aliens it means, you can see additional information about the movies below. You can also see other users’ comments, ranking statistics, and watch movie trailers online if you need help to make your choice. Each time you make a choice, your Top Movies list is updated accordingly, and stats about the movie you picked are also displayed.

There are three kinds of choices Flickchart throws at you:

• Easy: When one movie is obviously better than the other, it’s a no-brainer. Godfather vs. Jurassic Park 3? Next, please.
• Neither: Both movies are crap. Shanghai Surprise vs. Speed 2 Cruise Control? You don’t want to pick either one. But in the spirit of the site, you should.
• Impossible: I just got Citizen Kane vs. Casablanca. Can I close my browser? With such choices, you will curse Flickchart, and come back for more.

You can undo a choice you made if you want to rethink. But soon, you will find yourself with a Top 20 list that doesn’t seem right. There will be a few movies that appear just because they came up in your choices sooner. There are three ways in which you can tweak your Top Movies list.

1. Re-rank a Movie

To move a movie down in your Top 20 list, select it and choose to re-rank it. For example, I am not much into chasing tornadoes, and don’t like Twister in my Top 20 list. So I opted to re-rank it, and Flickchart gives me three more movies pitted against Twister.

2. Use Filters

You can filter by top movies, genre, year, or decade. If you’re interested in getting Star Wars in your list as soon as possible, the By Year option helps. Top Movies gives you the ability to pick and re-order movies within your Top 20, 50, 100, and 250 lists.

3. Remove a Movie

You can also remove a movie from Top Movies list altogether. Simply click to go to that movie’s information page and click Remove From My Flickchart. Your choices for that movie will also be forgotten.

Get Social

Your Top Movies list is publicly visible, even to your friends not using Flickchart (see mine). When faced with a brutal decision, you can share it with your friends via Friendfeed (Twitter and Facebook support is in the works).

For each pick, you can add your comments justifying your choice. Certain matchups can lead to hot debates and discussions. Batman Begins vs. The Dark Knight? You can join in the top discussions around popular matchups. Flickchart shows a nice chronological view of both sides.

Recommendations

Flickchart gives you a list of movies you haven’t seen, which are the highest ranked by other Flickchart users. Similar to Aibek’s tips in What Movie Should I Watch Next, Flickchart will give you recommendations based on the community rankings.

The Charts

Top users have ranked tens of thousands of movies and have hundreds of friends. All rankings are compiled to build Best/Worst Movies of all time lists, which can be filtered by genre, year, decade, etc. For example, you can see the Best Comedy Movies of the 2000s. The more movies you rank, the greater weight your opinion has in building the global list. This is Flickchart’s unique crowdsourced voting model. Netflix integration is planned as well, so you can directly add movies to your Netflix queue from within the site.

The folks behind Flickchart love MakeUseOf readers, so the first 250 people clicking this link will get instant exclusive access. You can still sign up and get an invite even if you miss the boat. A word of caution though: Flickchart is addictive. If you’re a movie lover, it will keep you hooked for just one more pick.

How many movies did you rank? Share your Top 20 list with us and other MakeUseOf readers in the comments!

I’ve shared a few ways to find great new music before here on MakeUseOf, and it’s time for another one! If anyone’s a music junkie like I am, each of these sites just gets more fun than the last.

This one’s called We Are Hunted, and is essentially a user-decided chart for all the best music of the Web. We Are Hunted doesn’t care whether a given song is being played on the radio, or getting tons of spins at clubs ““ if people on the Web are choosing to listen to it, We Are Hunted will let you know.

The great thing about We Are Hunted is that it doesn’t just get its information from its own users (which hugely limits the usefulness of some other, similar sites). Instead, it looks at blogs, social networks, forums, Twitter, P2P networks, Last.fm, iLike, MySpace Music, and elsewhere to find what people are actually listening to, and then creates a chart of the most popular songs and albums for your listening pleasure.

The popular songs come in the form of a square chart of songs or artists, nine at a time, that you can scroll through to find whatever tickles your fancy. The variety of music on the site is just ridiculous: from hip-hop to country to pop ballads, and everything in between. Some of the featured artists are reasonably well-known (Britney Spears, The Black Eyed Peas, and a couple other popular artists are on the list right now) to the totally-unheard of (Digitalism? Cool band name, never heard of them).

There are a number of different lists you can listen to ““ “Week,” the most-played songs from the last seven days, “Month” (three guesses what that one is), and “Emerging.” The first two tend to have more popular artists and better- known songs, and look a little more like the Billboard Charts. The Emerging list, my personal favorite, is the spot for the up-and-coming artists that aren’t on the Billboard Charts yet, but are blowing up on the Web.

In every list, all 100 songs can be played in their entirety, and are streamed to you from a few different sources ““ YouTube and artists’ sites, primarily. One thing to watch for ““ I found a couple instances of the wrong song being played (Right Round by Flo Rida, currently #1, actually played something else entirely). I only found it twice, though, out of about 100 songs I tried to play. Not a big deal, but something to be careful of.

If you find an artist you like, you can see more information about them (mostly links to reviews and whatnot on other sites) by clicking on the artist name. There’s also a list of Related Artists, to help you find even more good stuff. If you want to comment on an artist or song, it’s easy ““ either log in to the site, or through Facebook.

The Web is unique in that you’re able to listen to exactly what you want, when you want. By leveraging this, We Are Hunted knows and plays only what other people are actively trying to listen to, not just what’s playing on the radio to no one listening. Whether you want to know what’s hot now, or what’s poised to be hot, We Are Hunted is a perfect source.

Where do you find new music on the Web?

Photo: jmtimages

Chart Chooser from Juice Analytics is an innovative tool that lets you create Excel and Powerpoint charts and choose what characteristics you wish to highlight in your data; Comparison, Distribution, Composition, Trend, Relationship and/or Table, and it will filter the selections highlighting the possible charts for your needs.

Once you have decided on your selection, Chart Chooser will display options to download templates for Excel and Powerpoint. The downloaded files will have random data filled for you to get an idea of how the data is presented and where you will be able to enter your own figures.

The good news about this service is that Juice Analytics doesn’t seem to be stopping with the current selection of graphs available on the site. Users are encouraged to suggest different charts to be added to their website and even design bespoke versions for organisations. Juice Analytics have also endeavoured to make all their charts Tufte-compliant (clean and minimal) whilst remaining visually aesthetic.

Juice Analytics also operates an analytics blog that focuses on free tools and open source code. Here, you are able to find a wealth of information on how the Juice Analytics team tackle different projects, including this project inspired by the New York Times.

One tool that the team recently released was Concentrate, a search analytics tool for SEO and paid search professionals who wanted to make sense of search keyword data. Concentrate works by connecting to your Google Analytics account and helps to visualize keyword relationships to see connections and performance of common word combinations. All data collated by Concentrate is automatically formatted and information such as categorized search phrases and pattern groups can be downloaded to CSV format for off site analysis.

Juice Analytics is a great source of Excel and Powerpoint information as well as providing open source code, most of which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. If you need to impress the board, your boss or your peers at your next meeting, a visit to these guys, even just for the Chart Chooser, should be your first stop.

Do you know of any other sites that offer templates like these? If so, let us know of your recommendations in the comments!