PGF/TikZ

For a while now I was wondering how on earth those neat vector graphics in textbooks are made. I remember my professor of international economics producing graphs in CorelDraw, which is not the state of the art software I had expected.

Because I'm studying distributions at the moment, I was looking for a LaTeX bell shaped curve. I found the GPF/TikZ package and boy, this is what I needed for so long! Within TeX/LaTeX, it's a fairly recent addition. Its predecessor is PStricks, a postscript based graphical language that can't live in a PDF world.

Unlike much of the LaTeX manuals, the TikZ documentation is very instructive and even starts with 80 pages of tutorials. By the way, up to date manuals can always be found at:

http://texdoc.net/pkg/<packagename>

Online graphical calculators

Good news for people who want quick graphs: there is now a Google graphical calculator.

We already loved graph.tk, which delivers these kind of beauties:


Well, Google's graph thing may not be as slick, it is quite handy as you can enter multiple functions on one line from the search box. This for example gives us the Batman equation.

It doesn't replace your Matlab copy, as the output is below publication quality, but for a quick check it is brilliant and fun.

Making the Pay Gap look good (Tableau)

Here's a nice illustration of the capabilities of Tableau Software. Quite useful for the stakeholders in some projects I did.
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/making-pay-gap-look-good

Now everybody's impressed. But actually Tableau does not help you that much. It is a nice tool, but the quintessential thing about making graphs and tables is to give a message. These Tableau tables just provide a way to explore, yet that is what researchers are paid for. Using the interactive Tableau charts, you basically provide a fun tool to viewers. I agree there is a lot of demand for useless stuff too.

I liked the Pay Gap visualization anyway, but let's look at far worse graphs:

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/best-dutch-restaurants --> Is this a restaurant guide or a statistical tool? Main conclusion is that fancy restaurants are more likely to be found near the coast and the capital. Oh no...

Or this graph, which has wonderful colours, except you don't know what they stand for. Also, they do linear regression on sight, suggesting a discrete point where effects pop in. Could be an exponential effect though. http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/game-reviews

Yet, let us finish on a good note. While being easy to make with any statistical program, this graph and the interactive menus confront us with some astonishing insight. Very appropriate point of view.
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/great-divide

Even more graphics ... Excel to the rescue?

After a while, you get bored of Excel so much that you eventually forget it is capable of doing some good things too. That is, with the right plug ins.

The must-have plug in is Daniel's XL Toolbox. It has some statistical options that may save you some bucks on the basic SPSS package. I particularly like the option to make charts publication ready.

Not really a plug-in, but simply stunning, is Juice Labs' Chart Chooser. An online gallery of templates you can download to get started with better-than-average graphs. The guys made Chart Cleaner in the past, which improve your charts, BUT it forces you to enable macros.

The people at Juice Labs have some more goods in store, amongst which I am simply stunned by the Excel Geocoding Tool. What this allows you to do is to have a field describing an address or a town (don't try regions or countries), and then with one press on the button obtain the longitude and the latitude. There is even a link to Google Maps. What's the deal? Well, I'm thinking of the Stata tmap user command. This plots borders on your graph, and with the geocoding tool, you can overlay regional capital town names, for instance, or add values on exactly that spot. I realize the tmap geographic projection is not the best in the world, but at least this procedure is logical, and I like that.

More graphics ... javascript and html

As I see it, three teams compete for the King of Charts title:

• Illustrators
• Programmers
• Statisticians

However powerful our statistical languages, we're still far from the code that drives the Internet. A few websites of our online friends provide javascript code for very neat graphical output.

• Google Chart Tools: you must love the investment Google does in products that won't bring money in the short run. Very good graphics, intuitive syntax. There is even this playground.
• Fusion charts: it's free for schools and it does charts... but kind of an overload to me
• Highcharts: didn't really bother, yet the graphs look good

All in all, I believe these programmer tools are pretty useless for now. For instance, I manage to make a geochart with the Google syntax, but it's not possible to display city names unless you hover over the dots. Nice online, but not what we'd print out. Too bad, as Google's simplicity and respect for the ISO country codes is what we need.

Infographics

To us, researchers, two opposites demand always pop up:

• Be precise
• Make science look fun

In order to lean a bit more towards the latter, people created infographics and infographics tools. It's like the kind of graphs you read in newspapers or on posters. You may get close to the chart itself if you're really handy with Stata, but it takes way to much time for the simple chart you get. There are many tools that may do that easier and better. There are also much more artistic contribution you'll read about on the cool infographics blog. And be sure to check out this Swiss website on data visualizations.

The drawback: which tool will do what you want and exactly what you want? Basically, you need to be able to customize and add data. That brings you terribly close to Stata, doesn't it. Yet sometimes, these tools will really make it happen:

• Tableau: it's the more sophisticated package, available in a free ("public"), paid desktop and server version. You get it. Consultancy stuff. Basically it's all about two axis and a third dimension expressed in colours or size of dots. Also has annoying interactive dashboards we do not need.
• Many eyes: it's IBM software, so it should eventually find its way into SPSS. Nice charts, hard way to get there though. Worth a try and looks professional.
• Infogr.am: I haven't really figured out. It makes nice graphs, most importantly including the matrix charts I love (coloured little people representing counts). It's beta and buggy at the moment, and quite inflexible. Like how on earth do you change the shapes in the matrix chart? I do not know.
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• Pik to chart: this is only the lay-out part: nice fonts, few charts really.

Word clouds and social media

• wordle: looks very good
• visual.ly: the sole purpose of this website is to show off your work. Boring. Oh, there are a few tools to combine with your Facebook or Twitter website. Fancy stuff. Far from what we do.

Network visualizations

• Gephi: network visualizations. I don't do that. Much like Graph Viz, but I suppose more intuitive.

(I got the overview here, here and mostly here, still plenty of tools I haven't tried yet)