We use it when we need to bring different types of charts together - as in this map of top tax rates around the world, which also has a bar chart too.

If you don’t need the unlimited space of the professional edition, this is free - and means you can make pretty complex visualizations simply and easily with up to 100,000 rows. Also, watch out for over-complicated maps - Fusion can’t cope with more than a million points in one cell

Top tip: use shpescape to convert official shp files into Fusion tables for you to use. This excellent tutorial by Google’s Kathryn Hurley is a great place to start. You don’t have to be a coder to make one - and this Fusion layers tool allows you to bring different maps together or to create search and filter options, which you can then embed on a blog or a site. It’s also getting a new user interface, which should make it easier to use. The main advantage is the flexibility - you can can upload a kml file of regional borders, say - and then merge that with a data table. Homelessness interactive map (The Guardian) We used it to produce maps like the Iraq one above and also border maps like this one of homelessness too. The first time you try it, Fusion tables may seem a little tricky - but stick with it. You get all the high resolution of google maps but it can open a lot of data - 100mb of CSV, for instance. This online database and mapping tool has become our default for producing quick and detailed maps, especially those where you need to zoom in. That may sound a little disingenuous, in that we obviously have access to the Guardian’s amazing graphics and interactive teams for those pieces where we have a little more time - such as this map of public spending(created using Adobe Illustrator) or this Twitter riots interactive.īut for our day-to-day work, we often use tools that anyone can - and create graphics that anyone else can too. What data visualization tools are out there on the web that are easy to use - and free? Here on the Datablog and Datastore we try to do as much as possible using the internet’s powerful free options.

How to print tableau on mac