[HN Gopher] Datawrapper: Create charts, maps, and tables
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Datawrapper: Create charts, maps, and tables
Author : Garbage
Score : 289 points
Date : 2022-02-05 07:42 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datawrapper.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datawrapper.de)
| jenthoven wrote:
| I really like the "Connect to Google Sheet" option. Did you have
| to implement a Google Workspace plugin for that functionality?
| dkyc wrote:
| No, it's purely based on the Google Sheets/Drive API. Doesn't
| require you to install a plugin, just share your sheet with
| data@datawrapper.de or set it to public and you're good to go.
| easytiger wrote:
| This is what they used for The Spectator's (UK Political
| Magazine) excellent Covid Dashboards, where i first heard of it
|
| https://data.spectator.co.uk/
| danso wrote:
| I know d3 and ggplot2, but Datawrapper is my goto when I want
| Excel-like convenience for bespoke, detailed viz. It's completely
| free for individual use, and I'm happy to see that the charts and
| maps I made while teaching students about interactive data viz
| work just as well as they did the 5+ years ago.
|
| The variety of built-in shapefiles (international, US counties)
| -- with the ability to upload your own custom shapefiles to
| quickly create interactive maps -- is a killer feature on its own
| Mezzie wrote:
| I work for a company that's related to politics and we use DW
| and the maps are so good for us. It's also great for non-tech
| savvy people; everybody at the company can use it, which frees
| up tech staff's time for other stuff.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Can someone summarize how this compares to Plotly and
| ChartStudio? Also flexible and easy for non-programmers to
| master. And open sourse.
| Mandatum wrote:
| I've tried it with a relatively simple CSV but it's struggling to
| parse dates, generating meaningful reports, etc. The UX for
| choosing which columns to include is cumbersome when you have
| more than a handful. I've cut down the CSV from 50MB+ to 6MB and
| it's still so slow.
| huqedato wrote:
| Custom plan: $599/mo. Really ? Eject!
|
| There are thousands of open source apps that do this things free
| and better (D3, Datavis etc.). Just needed a little effort.
| schnebbau wrote:
| This isn't for you, it's for enterprises that don't want to
| spend human resources setting this up manually and supporting
| it.
| cududa wrote:
| Exactly. Had 0 intention working today, came across this,
| played with it. Will literally collapse days of work into
| minutes for our use case, once we connect to the API and
| integrate it into our workflow
| dkyc wrote:
| Awesome! Sounds super interesting, would be curious to
| learn more about your workflow (and maybe we can help
| somehow). Email in my profile if you're interested!
| yosamino wrote:
| This complaint is a bit strange given that they have an entire
| free tier for you to use and that their custom package includes
| them doing actual design work for you, not just more and better
| hosting options.
|
| _Every_ service can be replicated by just doing it yourself -
| the proposition here is that it might be - or might not,
| depending on your needs - more cost-effective than hiring a
| designer yourself do apply your branding to your data
| visualizations.
| polycaster wrote:
| Very appealing. Heavy price tag though for small and medium
| projects that are not focused solely on charting. Can someone
| recommend a product or service somewhere in between Datawrapper
| and D3 convenience wise?
|
| Edit: I realize there's a very generous free plan, but for real
| client projects white label is unfortunately often a must.
| dkyc wrote:
| (Disclaimer: I work at Datawrapper)
|
| For most projects, our free plan might suffice:
| https://blog.datawrapper.de/create-data-visualization-for-fr...
|
| It's fully usable for commercial use as well.
|
| In terms of in-between projects, if comfortable with a bit of
| programming I would probably look at Vega Lite [0] or
| Observable Plot [1]. For GUI tools, there's also the excellent
| RAW Graphs [2] to consider!
|
| [0] https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/ [1]
| https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot [2]
| https://rawgraphs.io/
| jkic47 wrote:
| Being able to try it without signup is such an underrated
| feature. Thank you for that!
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| One of the best SaaS websites I've seen. Lets you play with the
| tool as much as you want without signing up and the business
| model is totally aimed at businesses with a very generous free
| tier. Chart tools seem very powerful as well.
| sgt wrote:
| Pretty steep from free to $5990 per year. That's a lot of money
| for startups etc, but they can stick to the free tier. I'd be
| worried if the free tier suddenly changed though, but I doubt
| they'd do that to their potential customers. All in all I'd be
| willing to try this out.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| That's $50/seat/month if you have 10 seats and marginal seats
| are $21/month. Feels fine if lots of people will use it.
| Perhaps they are trying to avoid doing support for tiny
| customers.
| pisipisipisi wrote:
| Less than one FTE per month?
| davnn wrote:
| It's a really great experience to get started. By the way, the
| 404 page is great as well ;)
| https://www.datawrapper.de/nonexistant
| jackosdev wrote:
| Damn that's the best 404 I ever seen
| koshergweilo wrote:
| Is this just a form builder for D3?
| a1371 wrote:
| A relatively simple tech that everyone can build for a very
| generic use; yet, once you actually see it, you realize none of
| the chart making tools you have worked with are as
| straightforward. I wish I could think simple like this.
| dkyc wrote:
| Awesome to see this here! I'm one of the co-founders, open for
| any questions.
|
| We're also always looking for developers to join our team
| (Berlin-based, remote welcome, 4d week possible) - email me
| david@datawrapper for details.
| clementmas wrote:
| Very neat product! I especially like your Maps app (I myself
| built TravelMap.net).
|
| Are all your maps static?
|
| Do you generate and host your OSM vector tiles yourself?
| dkyc wrote:
| What do you mean by static?
|
| Yes, the tiles for our locator maps [0] are self-generated
| and hosted based on OSM source data and the OpenMapTiles
| project.
|
| The boundaries used for choropleths [1] are maintained by us
| based on various public sources (NaturalEarthData, OSM,
| government data, ...)
|
| [0] https://www.datawrapper.de/maps/locator-map [1]
| https://www.datawrapper.de/maps/choropleth-map
| clementmas wrote:
| Can you zoom in and drag your locator maps around once
| embedded? I only see images being generated
| dkyc wrote:
| The maps are rendered live (not as images), which is
| needed for responsiveness, but they are not
| draggable/zoomable. This is a product decision based on
| the explanatory/storytelling nature of the feature, we go
| into more detail here:
| https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/216-why-its-not-
| possi...
| rexreed wrote:
| Is there an API to get charts to/from a site without having to
| go through the Datawrapper site to generate? Especially on
| Google Sheets-linked charts. Would be nice to one-click
| generate new charts through an embedded API on our site.
| dkyc wrote:
| Yes, there's a REST API that lets you do that, documented
| here: https://developer.datawrapper.de/
|
| Available on the free plan as well!
| fellars wrote:
| Hi, do you allow startups to embed this into their product to
| offer to their customers as a chart builder solution without
| requiring them to create their own account?like an oem
| approach?
| dkyc wrote:
| Hey! At the moment, we solely focus on providing the best
| experience for our direct users, but we have received
| requests like this in the past, so it might be something to
| consider in the future. Happy to chat about details (email in
| my profile) if you want to.
| mellifluousbox wrote:
| Congrats on building such a great product!
|
| Do you support waterfall charts?
| dkyc wrote:
| Thank you! It's not a core chart type at the moment, but you
| can hack it using stacked column charts:
| https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/333-how-to-create-
| a-w...
|
| Might become one at some point!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Have you had many requests for the ability to add data to a
| narrative from datasets? We built this for seekwell
| (https://doc.seekwell.io/stories) and people really like it for
| daily or weekly text based business updates.
|
| I'd think this would be useful in media for a story they want
| to keep the numbers live in.
| dkyc wrote:
| Definitely - all Datawrapper visualisations can also be used
| with live data sources
| (https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/317-live-updates-
| over...). It used to be a bit of a fringe feature for things
| like elections or sports events, but since Covid reporting
| started it became a very dominant use case.
|
| The ,narrative' concept looks super interesting!
| hbarka wrote:
| @david this looks great. On the mapping viz features, I quickly
| glanced and saw squares for thematic and choropleth designs.
| Hexagons are well-suited for this and can convey a denser
| amount of information:
| https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/insider/thematic-mapping...
| ketzu wrote:
| I discovered datawrapper 2 months ago while looking at internet
| speeds vs age due to an unconvincing reddit debate [1] : I really
| liked it. Data presentation on the internet always frustrates me,
| because it usually is just a picture, or worse, a video. No
| interaction, no mouseover to check details.
|
| Datawrapper covered all of that, I really like that.
|
| [1] If you are interested: The argument was that older
| populations are the main factor of slow internet. No data was
| provided during the discussion. As I found that unconvincing I
| investigated based on easily accessible but skewed data. The
| result:
|
| OECD countries only (english):
| https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/YTBQ2/1/
|
| World (german, as it was the german subreddit):
| https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Ps2UG/1/
| kqr wrote:
| Wow, talk about stumbling over the mother of all confounded
| relationships!
| emn13 wrote:
| It's those pirates suppressing global warming once again ;-)
| ketzu wrote:
| Definitly. For me it was enough to see no obvious negative
| correlation(as was claimed) even though the data is not great
| and no analysis for other variables was done.
|
| The best result of that discussion was finding the tool and
| presentation.
| kqr wrote:
| Sorry, I don't follow. How is it enough to see no obvious
| negative correlation?
|
| This diagram says literally nothing since many of the
| important causal pathways involved are not sufficiently
| controlled for. Before and after seeing this diagram, you
| ought to have effectively no change in your belief.
| ketzu wrote:
| Original claim was: Internet speeds are low in Germany
| (and other countries) because of the high age of the
| people living there. Countries with a younger population
| place higher importance on the internet and therefore
| have higher internet speeds.
|
| The various data sources on "internet speeds" are not
| good, age is better docummented and probably less
| questionable (I never worked with humans to really
| establish any of that). I was under the impression that
| good data on internet speeds is hard to get, so I went
| for worse data to get a first impression.
|
| If the skew is not created by bad data (e.g., variable
| selection bias in different populations) but by other
| causal relationships, I believe it discredits the factor
| of population age as the main contributor.
|
| I was and am willing to discuss those weaknesses of the
| data in a discussion. I think I stated with those graphs
| that I stayed unconvinced of the claim, not that they are
| conclusive proof. I think of them as a form of
| exploration to see if a claim is worth further
| investigation (especially considering the amount of work
| needed for that).
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