9 ms·

RAWGraphs: missing link between spreadsheets and data visualization

146 points by sonograph 5y ago

jcims 5y ago
Hoping someone with more time and skills than I have writes a Splunk plugin with this. Would be super handy.
mcbishop 5y ago
I love Excel, but its chart functionality feels awkward and clunky to me. It's nice to see this alternative.
dgb23 5y ago
I really like this, ergonomic, usable as a layman but also extensible with the well established d3js library.
- oogetyboogety 5y ago
  would be nice to see how this compares to charting concepts in the polaris/tableau way or vega way
dang 5y ago
One small past thread: RAWGraphs: a missing link between spreadsheets and data visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695561 - Dec 2019 (10 comments)
dudus 5y ago
Can't this be a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel plugin instead of a web tool?
- cunthorpe 5y ago
  Why not both? Data doesn't come only from spreadsheets.
jordache 5y ago
The list of sponsors' logos at the bottom fo the page. I don't recognize any of them.
- cunthorpe 5y ago
  They're small sponsors with the exception of an Italian Telco, Fastweb
tW4r 5y ago
Now this is a "s/Facebook/Hacker News is tracking my life" coincidence. Just today I was looking to convert a CSV into a graph and came upon this exact site
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Anything new from 4 years ago?
refactor_master 5y ago
Wouldn’t the missing link actually be a library like pandas? Spreadsheets and data visualization are themselves end-goals for specific tasks already.
- cdrini 5y ago
  I would consider pandas more of an alternative to spreadsheets. Both are used to create/massage/reorganize data. RAWGraphs is more like an alternative to seaborn? Albeit much more limited but much easier to use. The "missing link" marketing is a little odd, since it's essentially just a visualization library (you don't have to use it with spreadsheets if you don't want to)--but that's just marketing.
simonw 5y ago
This tool uses the "drag and drop columns into the graph editor" pattern, which I've seen in a few other places too - Kibana Lens most recently: https://www.elastic.co/kibana/kibana-lens https://www.elastic.co/kibana/kibana-lens I have to admit this interface doesn't really fit the way I think about charts. I'm interested in alternative UI designs for this kind of charting tool that don't use drag-and-drop - anyone seen any good ones?
- wodend 5y ago
  Long time lurker here, just created an account since my friend had the same issue as you, so I started working on https://github.com/wodend/pysimpleplotter https://github.com/wodend/pysimpleplotter. It is still in development, but please give it a try and let me know if it better suits your use-case, keep in mind this was specifically designed to work with CSV/TSV output from scientific instruments. We plan on supporting exporting charts with styles for specific journals, and I will add better error handling when I get time.
  - vvll 5y ago
    I’ve seen pyDatView: https://github.com/ebranlard/pyDatView https://github.com/ebranlard/pyDatView which I use for time-series csv files generally. Might be some good inspiration for you too!
- btown 5y ago
  Tableau follows this drag-and-drop pattern, but in a much more explicit way than Kibana, with the ability to drop columns onto slots with (more-or-less) predictable effects. It's immensely polished - and priced accordingly. https://help.tableau.com/current/guides/get-started-tutorial/en-us/get-started-tutorial-drag.htm https://help.tableau.com/current/guides/get-started-tutorial... I'm actually not sure there's a better UI pattern for the nontechnical user. If you want to visualize both the slots and the options at once to give people a sense of what they can do with their current schema... you don't just want a dropdown for each slot that's going to forget your state, move all over the place, etc.
  - 5y ago
almostdigital 5y ago
I really wanted to like this, I've tried it several times but always end up with either having to pre-process my data to fit whatever vis I'm trying to create or just simply not being able to do it. I recommend https://observablehq.com https://observablehq.com, once you get a hang of it and have a couple of templates setup for your workflows it's similar effort of this and you have a lot more flexibility.
- cdrini 5y ago
  I think this is by design. The idea is you bring your data in the expected format (using spreadsheets, or pivot tables, or observable, or pandas), and RAWGraphs will make one of a few common modern visualisations. The sort of stuff you would hope Excel/etc. will have out of the box someday. Observable is definitely more of a power house :) Out of curiosity, do you have any templates you'd be willing to share?
  - almostdigital 5y ago
    Not really :) But it's mostly variants of stuff you can find on https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
My current setup is a postgres db and jupyter instance running on docker. Data visualization is easy enough with seaborn/matplotlib/pandas plotting. I would love to see a better tool for this but its hard to beat running your own. There is no vendor lock in, no subscription fee, no uploading large datasets, no privacy issues on private data, no "gotcha" moment when the tool can't produce quite the visualization you're looking for.
- prennert 5y ago
  You seem to have a good setup, but if you are looking for a solution to share easily between people, have a look at Metabase. It works pretty well, if your data lives in a DB hosted somewhere and you only want to plot data that can be derived from SQL queries (potentially from tables produced by nightly batch process), and want to allow different people to look at the data via dashboard. I used to do all plotting in Pandas etc locally and share them if required. But with Metabase it is easier to share plots, which are also always fresh. RAWGraphs seems to have a different target audience. Judging by the sponsors, it seems to aim at people who keep their data in Excel and then need a nice plot for a publication or something. So it might be useful as a prototyping tool for scientists who barely code and keep the data they collect in Excel spreadsheets.
  - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    Metabase looks cool, thanks I'll give it a try.
  - cormacrelf 5y ago
    I second this. I've deployed Metabase once and almost immediately requests for data started coming out of the woodwork, from folks who previously had no knowledge of what kind of information was available or how to ask for it. Visibility is called that for a reason. It's also really easy to self-host. Download the .jar. Whack it on a machine with a wireguard VPN and a route to the DB or somewhere suitable in the cloud. Create a read-only credential. Letsencrypt it & bless it with a DNS name, ideally with some internal-only IP address. Invite your boss to view some live stats on what's happening with the live product. Wait a day or so for them to request that some other underling also gets access or that some Metabase query gain some formal role in a business process. Also watch them have the best week of their manager life, with every kind of stat at their fingertips.
cateye 5y ago
I once wanted to create a custom chart. I found https://plotly.com/chart-studio/ https://plotly.com/chart-studio/ the most flexible and powerful online tool.
Partical 5y ago
I think that's a really good tool for someone would like to visualize their data with better way. For me, the UI it's quite good and intuitive. And generated charts also beautiful.
OliverM 5y ago
I built a whole startup, GetBulb (still kind of up at https://getbulb.com https://getbulb.com) that pretty much did exactly this, but aimed more exclusively at Excel/spreadsheet users. This was around 2014. We received some investment but the market seemed to want consultancy work for custom visualisation over a set of templates that needed users to have some judgement on what template best suited their data.
hermitcrab 5y ago
This works really nicely with our data munging tool. Just copy your data from Easy Data Transform (after any filtering, joining, cleaning etc) and paste it in. Choose the axes. Graph.
- hermitcrab 5y ago
  Does it have a REST API or some other way to drive it from another application? I couldn't find anything.

146 points by sonograph 5y ago

jcims 5y ago

Hoping someone with more time and skills than I have writes a Splunk plugin with this. Would be super handy.

mcbishop 5y ago

I love Excel, but its chart functionality feels awkward and clunky to me. It's nice to see this alternative.

dgb23 5y ago

I really like this, ergonomic, usable as a layman but also extensible with the well established d3js library.

oogetyboogety 5y ago
would be nice to see how this compares to charting concepts in the polaris/tableau way or vega way

dang 5y ago

One small past thread: RAWGraphs: a missing link between spreadsheets and data visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695561 - Dec 2019 (10 comments)

dudus 5y ago

Can't this be a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel plugin instead of a web tool?

cunthorpe 5y ago
Why not both? Data doesn't come only from spreadsheets.

jordache 5y ago

The list of sponsors' logos at the bottom fo the page. I don't recognize any of them.

cunthorpe 5y ago
They're small sponsors with the exception of an Italian Telco, Fastweb

tW4r 5y ago

Now this is a "s/Facebook/Hacker News is tracking my life" coincidence. Just today I was looking to convert a CSV into a graph and came upon this exact site

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Anything new from 4 years ago?

refactor_master 5y ago

Wouldn’t the missing link actually be a library like pandas? Spreadsheets and data visualization are themselves end-goals for specific tasks already.

cdrini 5y ago
I would consider pandas more of an alternative to spreadsheets. Both are used to create/massage/reorganize data. RAWGraphs is more like an alternative to seaborn? Albeit much more limited but much easier to use. The "missing link" marketing is a little odd, since it's essentially just a visualization library (you don't have to use it with spreadsheets if you don't want to)--but that's just marketing.

simonw 5y ago

This tool uses the "drag and drop columns into the graph editor" pattern, which I've seen in a few other places too - Kibana Lens most recently: https://www.elastic.co/kibana/kibana-lens https://www.elastic.co/kibana/kibana-lens I have to admit this interface doesn't really fit the way I think about charts. I'm interested in alternative UI designs for this kind of charting tool that don't use drag-and-drop - anyone seen any good ones?

wodend 5y ago
Long time lurker here, just created an account since my friend had the same issue as you, so I started working on https://github.com/wodend/pysimpleplotter https://github.com/wodend/pysimpleplotter. It is still in development, but please give it a try and let me know if it better suits your use-case, keep in mind this was specifically designed to work with CSV/TSV output from scientific instruments. We plan on supporting exporting charts with styles for specific journals, and I will add better error handling when I get time.
- vvll 5y ago
  I’ve seen pyDatView: https://github.com/ebranlard/pyDatView https://github.com/ebranlard/pyDatView which I use for time-series csv files generally. Might be some good inspiration for you too!
btown 5y ago
Tableau follows this drag-and-drop pattern, but in a much more explicit way than Kibana, with the ability to drop columns onto slots with (more-or-less) predictable effects. It's immensely polished - and priced accordingly. https://help.tableau.com/current/guides/get-started-tutorial/en-us/get-started-tutorial-drag.htm https://help.tableau.com/current/guides/get-started-tutorial... I'm actually not sure there's a better UI pattern for the nontechnical user. If you want to visualize both the slots and the options at once to give people a sense of what they can do with their current schema... you don't just want a dropdown for each slot that's going to forget your state, move all over the place, etc.
- 5y ago

almostdigital 5y ago

I really wanted to like this, I've tried it several times but always end up with either having to pre-process my data to fit whatever vis I'm trying to create or just simply not being able to do it. I recommend https://observablehq.com https://observablehq.com, once you get a hang of it and have a couple of templates setup for your workflows it's similar effort of this and you have a lot more flexibility.

cdrini 5y ago
I think this is by design. The idea is you bring your data in the expected format (using spreadsheets, or pivot tables, or observable, or pandas), and RAWGraphs will make one of a few common modern visualisations. The sort of stuff you would hope Excel/etc. will have out of the box someday. Observable is definitely more of a power house :) Out of curiosity, do you have any templates you'd be willing to share?
- almostdigital 5y ago
  Not really :) But it's mostly variants of stuff you can find on https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery https://observablehq.com/@d3/gallery

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

My current setup is a postgres db and jupyter instance running on docker. Data visualization is easy enough with seaborn/matplotlib/pandas plotting. I would love to see a better tool for this but its hard to beat running your own. There is no vendor lock in, no subscription fee, no uploading large datasets, no privacy issues on private data, no "gotcha" moment when the tool can't produce quite the visualization you're looking for.

prennert 5y ago
You seem to have a good setup, but if you are looking for a solution to share easily between people, have a look at Metabase. It works pretty well, if your data lives in a DB hosted somewhere and you only want to plot data that can be derived from SQL queries (potentially from tables produced by nightly batch process), and want to allow different people to look at the data via dashboard. I used to do all plotting in Pandas etc locally and share them if required. But with Metabase it is easier to share plots, which are also always fresh. RAWGraphs seems to have a different target audience. Judging by the sponsors, it seems to aim at people who keep their data in Excel and then need a nice plot for a publication or something. So it might be useful as a prototyping tool for scientists who barely code and keep the data they collect in Excel spreadsheets.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Metabase looks cool, thanks I'll give it a try.
- cormacrelf 5y ago
  I second this. I've deployed Metabase once and almost immediately requests for data started coming out of the woodwork, from folks who previously had no knowledge of what kind of information was available or how to ask for it. Visibility is called that for a reason. It's also really easy to self-host. Download the .jar. Whack it on a machine with a wireguard VPN and a route to the DB or somewhere suitable in the cloud. Create a read-only credential. Letsencrypt it & bless it with a DNS name, ideally with some internal-only IP address. Invite your boss to view some live stats on what's happening with the live product. Wait a day or so for them to request that some other underling also gets access or that some Metabase query gain some formal role in a business process. Also watch them have the best week of their manager life, with every kind of stat at their fingertips.

cateye 5y ago

I once wanted to create a custom chart. I found https://plotly.com/chart-studio/ https://plotly.com/chart-studio/ the most flexible and powerful online tool.

Partical 5y ago

I think that's a really good tool for someone would like to visualize their data with better way. For me, the UI it's quite good and intuitive. And generated charts also beautiful.

OliverM 5y ago

I built a whole startup, GetBulb (still kind of up at https://getbulb.com https://getbulb.com) that pretty much did exactly this, but aimed more exclusively at Excel/spreadsheet users. This was around 2014. We received some investment but the market seemed to want consultancy work for custom visualisation over a set of templates that needed users to have some judgement on what template best suited their data.

hermitcrab 5y ago

This works really nicely with our data munging tool. Just copy your data from Easy Data Transform (after any filtering, joining, cleaning etc) and paste it in. Choose the axes. Graph.

hermitcrab 5y ago
Does it have a REST API or some other way to drive it from another application? I couldn't find anything.