This is an Eval Central archive copy, find the original at freshspectrum.com.
Friday is tool day! Datawrapper is one of my all time favorite data design tools, watch the video to learn why.
Transcript
Hello. So this week, I thought we try something new on Fridays. I was thinking, maybe we talk about tools like different pieces of software. That could be helpful to you. If you were trying to do any type of information, design data design work. So that’s what we’ll talk about today. All right. Let’s start with the problem. If you’re creating reports. You need to create more than just the one pager, the three pager that 30 pager. In the modern setting. Because we need to reach more audiences. It’s harder to reach those audiences. So we need more things out there in order to even hope. To reach a broader audience. So that means we have to create a lot of reports and that means a lot of charts and that sort of thing.
So it’s one thing to say it would be great if we had tons of money and we could invest more time in reporting. But that doesn’t really happen. Really? It’s the same amount of time you just are expected to create more reports. So you need to change your process, need to have tools that let you create things faster.
Some of those tools are tools that are built for data, journalists or journalists in general. If you think about it newspaper creates tons of charts and they have to create charts on a regular basis. And they have, especially if they’re reporting daily or even weekly that’s a lot of charts they have to create.
And they have to be publishable quality and ready to go. So there are a few tools out there that help you with this. And one of my favorites is a tool called data wrapper. You’ll find it at data, rapper dot D E. It’s one of the eights, one of these new types of tools that really starts. Close to a professional looking professional quality chart.
You don’t have to do much for it. Once he created a really easy to share. It’s not like you’re working in Excel and you have to like, almost break down everything to create something that’s ready to be published. It’s ready to be published right off the bat. It’s also not complicated, like Tableau or power BI or anything. You’re not diving into huge datasets and trying to reformulate everything.
It’s really a chart builder or a map maker. A modern kind of data, visualization chart and map and table tool. There are a few things that you should know about it. One, the price. It is either free or lots of money. This is one of the things about these kind of journalism dataviz tools.
They have fantastic free plans link. You can do so much with the free plan. They’re forever free. Not like trial version kind of free plans. But if you wanted to actually pay for it you need like, 600 a month and it’s for a team that kind of thing. So there was not really a price point for somebody who’s just an individual designer, that sort of thing.
Luckily, you can do tons with the free plan, so you don’t even have to pay for the pro plan. One day, maybe they’ll have an individual pro plan. And if anyone from data wrapper is watching maybe 80 bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month for an individual plan might not be a bad idea. But until that happens.
Free is great. Let’s keep it free. All right. Better faster. So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to not be overwhelmed. Data wrapper. Sets it up. It’s 1, 2, 3, 4 steps to a chart and they walk you through step-by-step. So you start with the data, then you work into the design and then some other factors. And then finally you get to the publishing part of things.
And they really walk you through the process, make it really easy. All your data is private by default. This isn’t like Tableau, public. It’s not going up to a public server immediately. It is private. You don’t even have to log in to data wrapper in order to create charts.
You can just go to data, wrapper dot D E, open it up, run through the process.
Data wrapper is GDPR friendly. They don’t track. Make money selling other people’s data. So that’s an important aspect here too. A lot of companies do. Not this one. It really is a high quality company, I think. So hopefully it stays that way, but right now I am a big fan of data wrapper as a company.
And then finally accessibility. This is one of those afterthought kind of things. It’s one of my biggest gripes with tools like Canva is their lack of accessibility tools. With data wrapper there, just like you can test different types of colorblindness. On the actual charts, it’ll show you what it looks like for different people. So you can test your, colors and that sort of thing. It gives you a really easy way to do alt text.
Which is also really useful. And then you can embed these charts in other places. Just straight from data wrapper. You, once you log in, you’ll have a library of your charts. And that’s a reason to log in, or you can just save them as PNGs and put them out elsewhere like that. So that’s my tool of the day.
Today’s data wrapper. So again, data wrapper. Dot D E it’s a German company. And yeah. Check it out, play with it. It’s super fun. Have a great weekend. And I’ll talk to you soon. All right. Bye.