Visualizing Data with Charts, Software / Apps

[Riggz]

Hey Moz Community,

I frequently find myself making charts with landing page data, product categories, etc... with excel and the basic charts in excel.

There are two things I am looking for in this question: Online and Offline, they can be paid or free, just looking for whatever is the best.

1. [Offline] Would love to see some suggestions on maybe web-apps or software that can allow you to create more visually appealing charts than the ones generated in excel.
2. [Online] I am also looking for some API's / Jquery / solutions that can create pretty awesome looking charts that could easily be implemented in a web-app dashboard.

Looking forward to seeing some of the things that are out there and your recommendations!

Thanks, Jason

[randfish]

We've been loving a few things:

• http://www.gooddata.com/
• http://www.tableausoftware.com/ - Will Critchlow wrote a post using some of their cool stuff here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/data-visualization-techniques
• http://www.geckoboard.com/

Not sure if any/all of these will work for you, but they are definitely worth a look.

We're also planning on getting more advanced/polished data visualization into the Moz web app and tools, but our priority has been data quality, scalability, uptime, speed and features, so it may be a little while before we get it where we want it

[Riggz]

Gooddata and Tableausoftware look interesting, thanks for sending those along. Essentially we are creating an online dashboard for clients to be able to access their data in quick and aesthetically please way. I will read more into those two and see if they would be able to handle what we are looking for for one of our new applications we are working on.

Thanks for sharing the article from Will as well, it was pretty cool, I somehow managed to miss it a year ago!

I actually like the visualizations in the Campaign manager for pro members, I like the clean design and the simplicity in the nofollow vs follow, and the URL's entered via search term graphs. Looking forward to seeing more data visualized in the future, pictures make people happy

Thanks for your quick response!