Research Guides: Digital Projects Lab: Data Visualization Tools

Data & Visualization Tools

Data Wrangler
Powerful tool to transform spreadsheet data into relational format.
Open Refine
OpenRefine is a powerful tool for cleaning, transforming, and combining with messy data. Free download and installation. Great for combining csv, json, rdf or linked dataset formats.

Tableau
Tableau can be used to create and share interactive data dashboards. Tableau Public is a free desktop, or web-based tool.
Google Data Studio
Create and share interactive visualizations and dashboards online with this free, easy and flexible tool from Google.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is a data dashboarding tool by Microsoft, that enables users to create and share interactive dashboards. This tool works as either a web-based tool, or downloadable desktop application.

Data Wrapper
A free web-based tool to create visualizations from tabular datasets. A free account can be created to save hi-resolution images, a link or embeddable iframe code to connect to your visualization online.
Plotly Chart Studio
Plotly Chart Maker is a free, web-based tool to create charts using D3 and WebGL, with no coding required. A free account can be created to use the plotly chart maker online.
Raw Graphs
A free web-based data visualization tool. Raw graphs is useful for creating visuals in vector format (svg graphics), which can be further edited using tools like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

Timeline Storyteller
An open-source expressive visual storytelling environment for presenting timelines.
Timeline JS
TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables you to build visually-rich interactive timelines
Flourish Data Visualization
A free, web-based tool to build data visualizations. This tools provides easy to use templates for creating interactive graphics from spreadsheet or tabular datasets.
Gephi
Gephi is free open-source desktop software used to visualize network datasets.

A powerful web-based GIS platform for mapping and spatial analysis. See example Story Maps at ArcGIS.com.

Easily create and share dynamic interactive web maps.

Learn More about GIS and mapping resources at Cal Poly

RStudio
RStudio IDE is a powerful and productive user interface for R. It’s free and open source, and works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Jupyter Notebooks
Jupyter Notebooks a rich architecture for interactive computing with:
Powerful interactive shells, browser-based notebook interactive data visualization, and easy to use, high performance tools for parallel computing.
Data Science Toolkit
A collection of the best open data sets and open-source tools for data science, wrapped in an easy-to-use REST/JSON API with command line, Python and Javascript interfaces.
GitHub Student Pack
Software development tools, made available to students through GitHub Education.

A visual guide to chart types, with links to the tools available to construct different visualization types.

The Visualizing Data Blog curated list of resources for working with and visualizing data.