With Venn Diagrams and Pie Charts for All
Posted Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am by Marissa (47 posts)
Google keeps churning out the freebies, and we keep having fun with them. Take a look at Google Charts, a fast and easy way to visual charts on your Web site. No Photoshop necessary. In just a few minutes, I was able to create this visual, showing how many blog posts I’ve written in recent months:
As with all things Google, the possibilities are endless. You can put together variations of pie charts, Venn diagrams, bar graphs, maps, and meters. You can have an endless supply of colors. You can label and define your axes. There are dozens of variables.
To make a Google Chart, take you take the base URL http://chart.apis.google.com/chart and add variables to the end of it. These variables tell Google what the look of the chart will be.
So this URL:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=225×125&cht=gom&chd=t:70&chl=Donation Goals
will show you a “Goole-o-meter” graph that is 225 pixels wide by 125 pixels tall, that shows 70% completion, with the label “Donation Goals”.
You could have quite a bit of fun with this one. I’d like to try creating script-based calculators to allow the user to input numbers to instantly create a new graph.
In what ways will you use (or have you used) Google Charts?
