data visualization for non-programmers

Data visualization can be a powerful way for journalists to illuminate aspects of a story that might not be immediately apparent by simply reading text. Many stories have a data component just waiting to be surfaced. While reporting, ask yourself whether there might be angles to the story which would lend themselves to being stored as rows and columns which can later be analyzed, assessed, and displayed as charts and graphs, or as more creative visualizations. In some cases, your readership can actually help add new data to the story in real time, helping make your piece "evergreen."

The trouble with data visualization is that it's not a particular technology that can be picked up by reading a single tutorial. There are dozens or hundreds of data visualization tools out there, data sources often arrive in an "unclean" state, people work with many different database and spreadsheet technologies, and the tools to transform data sources into web-based visuals often require programming skills that aren't available to the typical journalist.

For advanced or highly customized data visualizations, you'll want to either be an experienced web developer or have access to one on your crew. However, there are ways to do basic visualizations with free tools provided by Google and others, no programming required. While the programming-free tools won't give you the range of flexibility you get with programmed solutions, they work fine in many situations.

We can't overemphasize the importance of working with tools that operate with live data, i.e. data stored in a web database. That way, when data is updated, your visualizations are updated as well, without having to do any additional work behind the scenes to bring your visualizations up to date. Many of the data visualization solutions out there assume you're going to create an "XML" file from a dataset, and derive a graphic from that file. But when the data changes, you'll have to create a new XML file (a sometimes tedious task) and re-upload it to your web server. Working with live data is clearly preferable, but unfortunately usually assumes you have access to the programming tools it takes to make that happen. Google Spreadsheets and Gadgets is one of the best ways we've found to let non-programmers build basic visualizations of live data.

In this tutorial, we'll look at some of the surprising capabilities locked away in Google Spreadsheets, including creating simplified data entry forms and applying Google Gadgets to spreadsheet data for visualization purposes. The first page of the tutorial shows a series of visualizations pulled in real-time from a Google spreadsheet. The pages that follow show exactly how to create them.