Produce visualizations of your findings

After working through the tutorial you should be able to:

To complete this tutorial you need to have:

If you need help creating the project or linking the dataset to it, detailed instructions are in the tutorial Create a project to work with data.

You can create visualizations of tabular data files in a project without ever writing a query. For this example we'll use the Bee Colony Census 2017 by State file from the dataset Bee Colony Data 2017 in your project. To create a visualization of all the data in the file, expand the view of the Bee colony Data 2017 by clicking the arrow to the left of the dataset in your project directory pane, and select the file Bee Colony Census 2017 by State:

Unless you have already set-up the Chart Builder integration you'll need to do that next. Click the dropdown arrow next to Open in app in the upper right of the screen and choose + Add more integrations:

This action will take you to the BI and Visualization tools section of our Integrations page, and the Chart Builder integration is right at the top:

Select Chart Builder and Enable Integration:

You'll be prompted to authorize Chart Builder

After authorizing, when you are on your workspace you'll see the Open in app link has been replaced by Open with Chart Builder. Select Open with Chart Builder to continue.

Chart Builder comes with two options for creating and modifying charts: a Visual Builder and a Vega-Lite Editor. The easiest way to use it is to create your initial chart on the Visual Builder tab and then switch over to the Vega-Lite Editor to make any changes outside the scope of the Visual Builder. See our article on using Vega-Lite or the Vega-Lite website for more information.

To create a quick bar chart of the number of colonies by state in 2017 select the field state from the dropdown list for the x-axis, and value from the list on the y-axis. Like magic, our chart appears on the right side of the screen:

Chart Builder can also be used on queries. Using a query as the basis for your chart enables you to:

For this example we'll write a query against the file Bee Colony Census Data by State in the Bee Colony Statistics dataset. The only columns we care about for our chart are the year, state and value columns so that's all we'll select. We also would like to show something more meaningful as the name for the value column so we'll change that in our query to # of hives:

After saving the query and opening it with Chart Builder we can create our graph. As before we select state for the x-axis, # of hives for the y-axis, and this time, because we have data from multiple years included, we use Color for year:

One thing you might notice about this chart is that the data on the number of hives is pretty compressed. We can adjust the size in the chart size options on the left or by clicking on the backwards L symbol in the bottom right corner of the screen and dragging the window to be the size you would like:

Another handy thing you can do in the options section is order the results in your graph. You may have ordered them already in your query results, but that order does not carry over to the graph. To sort by the state with the most hives select Options on the x-axis, choose Descending for the sort and y - # of hives on the sort field:

Chart-builder visualizations on data.world can be downloaded in a number of json, image, and html formats shown under the Download button:

There are also a variety of options for sharing/saving your visualization on data.world:

Selecting Share > Insight lets you add your visualization to any project on data.world for which you have permission. To share the insight you are prompted to chose a project where you will share it (the default is your current project), to give it a title, and optionally to add comments:

Share > File lets you add the visualization to any dataset or project for which you have permission. The easiest way to choose your dataset or project is to click Select to the right of the Dataset/Project field to get a dropdown list of all the datasets and projects to which you have access:

Share > Markdown Embed (Comment) you can embed your chart in any place which accepts Markdown (e.g., insights, comments, summaries). Text fields in data.world now default to the Simple Text Editor instead of to Markdown so to add the copied markdown-embed from Chart Builder to a text field you'll first need to switch the editor to Markdown from the option in the upper right corner of the text field:

Paste the embedded code and when you select Done, the chart will display in the text field. More information on how to use Markdown on data.world can be found in our article on Markdown.

Finally, if you want to share a link to the Chart Builder screen for the visualization so someone else can edit and run it, you can do so with the Share > URL option:

You can see the above example on the discussions page for the project. Note the use of Markdown stying to make the comment more readable. Detailed instructions for using Markdown on data.world can be found here.

Visualizations are a great way to bring people into your project as they are accessible to people from all different levels of data analysis. Chart Builder gives you the ability to create quick visualizations of your data that you can share and save for use in your analysis. For a deeper, more powerful visualization experience, try our integration with Tableau.