Mastodawn

Data visualisation help much appreciated

I'm sick of presenting shitty Excel data visualisations as much as I love what eg. D3.js can do. There's some fancy stuff out there but they all require coding to some extent to run or be embedded … all of which proved being beyond me. I need a solution that can interpret simple structured .csv (or .txt or smth similar simple), and outputs vector/bitmap files.

My aim is to create 2D data visualisations (donut chart for data set A, vertical bar chart for data set B). Both data sets are simple tables:
A
NAME (txt) | VALUE (int.)

B
NAME (txt) | VALUE (int.) or VALUE (hh:mm:ss)

Names are people's names and may run a bit long.

Yes, I do run some CLI stuff regularly but I can't code.
No, I don't want to use AI.
No, I don't want to register for a paid subscription to a capitalist platform.

Help and boosts appreciated!

#dataviz #datavis #datavisualization #datavisualisation

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solo

@BabyFn0rd I think what you want is graphviz

usually used on the cli, but there are some gui tools for it as well

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[ πɑ@Betty_Fn0rd ~ ]$

1d ago

@solonovamax @ShadowJonathan @multioculate
Thanks y'all. I guess the catch with me is that I likely will fail at writing anything from scratch, that would do the job with either GraphViz, Python and/or GNUplot.

Cuz creating the graphs is like 1% of my work schedule, hence, there's only so much time and energy available, rendering learning what it takes for GraphViz or GNUplot clearly out of my scope. If there'd be something that I could just tweak (a bit) to read data structured close enuf to what I have …

Yes I admit being just a lame ass qualitative empirical sociologist and not a clever data analyst

I really do wonder why there's nothing out there that just lets you paste csv style data and renders a graph of your choice.

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multioculate 1d ago

@BabyFn0rd For stuff like "take these columns from a CSV and make me a bar chart", Gnuplot is probably pretty accessible from a "copy-and-paste example, change column names" perspective. Compared to Python, it's a very dedicated tool -- sort of like a command-line just for making graphs.

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solo 1d ago

@BabyFn0rd @ShadowJonathan @multioculate wait actually I meant gnuplot not graphviz

I always mix the two up istg

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solo 1d ago

@BabyFn0rd @ShadowJonathan @multioculate gnuplot is extremely easy to use and tbh should basically do what you want out of the box with minimal tweaking

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[ πɑ@Betty_Fn0rd ~ ]$

7h ago

@solonovamax @ShadowJonathan @multioculate Peeps, thanks y'all so far! Really. Tried my lame best but didn't even got my data processed in the first place, in any of the rec's (here taking a course in Plotly clearly is over the top). That said, good to know what's out there even if I couldn't handle any of them.

After nothing worked out I tried ObservableHQ (based on the nice D3.js) but ... if such a tool doesn't allow interpreting a basic two-dimensional .csv matrix correctly w/o RTFM, then your targeted user group isn't either academics of humanities nor graphic design .

So, feeling like a dumbass again , it's back to Excel for fucks sake or in the end, time permitting, I do it all manually in Illustrator.