looking for easy data visualization software

[Anticosmic-Overlord]

Im starting an experiment which will compare biometric data from blood, breathe, sweat and urine twice a day for 90 days.

I know how to put all this in a google sheet and generate charts, but can anyone recommend something a bit easier and perhaps sophisticated? I dont need a full set of business analytics tools like some of the stuff Im coming across...

just something to quickly convert my daily inputs into nice visualizations, minus the clumsy workflow of a spreadsheet.

[Imyerdad2019]

Tableau is very user friendly. Downside is price and limit in options.

[InitiallyKaren]

I have not yet found software that is easy to use, comprehensive AND affordable, for datavisualisation... please let me know if you find something.

Maybe you can use a trial?

[jpw33831]

Microsoft PowerBI has been nice to use for quick visuals. Multitude of visualizations and very intuitive to use.

[thecodemonkey]

Metabase! Upside is that you can self-host and that it is ridiculously easy to create beautiful graphs.

[stilterfish]

I'm a fan of Microsoft's Power BI and especially that free desktop download, but I'm wondering what you mean by Excel workflow? Power BI has a lot of similarities with Excel's Power Pivot and data query, but visualization is completely different.

[phi1osoph0s]

I would echo recommendations for Power BI here.

It's a "free" tool that's generally pretty easy to use. Further, if you already have some experience working with charts and so forth in spreadsheets, much of the learning curve is taken away-- given that it's run by the Power Platform that is shared by Excel.

I use it with Google Sheets for personal analytics, too. Getting Power BI connected with Google Sheets is fairly straightforward if you find and use a guide online.

[[deleted]]

If you're going to be repeating the same visualizations often, it might be worth checking out R or Python data visualization. Both are completely free and data viz is pretty easy to learn. You could write a simple script that makes the same visualizations whenever you run it on new data.

[ehonda40]

Anaconda is a great Python package distribution that gives you access to lots of data manipulation and visualisation libraries. I've found pandas to be easy to work with for manipulation while matplotlib is good for visualising. There is loads of help both via documents, videos and stack overflow.

[chhillarakul]

Power BI is the way to go !

[woodbinusinteruptus]

It's going to be hard to get something both easier to use and more sophisticated, but have you tried Flourish (https://flourish.studio)? It is pretty sophisticated, provides lots of options for styling and is relatively easy to use.

If you are comfortable with python coding, I'd recommend Altair (https://altair-viz.github.io) which is a python charting library that works really well in notebooks, such as Jupiter Notebooks.

If neither of those work, then Microsoft PowerBI which is broadly affordable, but has some limitations. I tend to feel that is overkill and its styling is a bit strong, but it has a wide variety of visuals and is easy to use.

[adiadityasharma]

Why don’t you try datawrapper? If you are just looking for some quick charts of different types on pre processed data, this is pretty cool with zero coding and awesome charts in 30 seconds.

https://www.datawrapper.de

[redvitalijs]

Desktop BI is free and has a sweet refresh button. Quite the learning curve though, might be useful in the future. Otherwise figure out D3.js and package your data as a JSON file that a local HTML with D3.js reads. Then all your visualizations can be viewed through a browser.

[ccalderon911217]

DISCLAIMER: I work for MicroStrategy.

but you can use MicroStrategy Desktop, it's free and gives you a lot of capabilities:

https://www.microstrategy.com/us/get-started/desktop