Small Business

Visualize Your Data for Innovative PowerPoint Presentations

By Dave Johnson

Updated on: October 4, 2010 / 12:20 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

Need to deliver a lot of fairly dry or complex numbers and want a smarter, more engaging way to display it? You can try the charts and graphs in PowerPoint, but we've seen most of those before. What you need is a fresh and elegant way to visualize your information.

ManyEyes is a free Web tool that lets you display data in a wide variety of visualizations. Just create a free account and upload your data so ManyEyes can manipulate it. Then choose one of about two dozen visualizations. The options are divided into these categories:

Analyze text, which includes word trees and word clouds
Compare a set of values, which augment traditional bar charts with histograms and bubble charts
See relationships among data points, which features network and node diagrams and scatterplots
See the parts of a whole has treemaps and pie charts
See the world is chock full of data maps
Track rises and falls over time includes stack charts and line graphs

You can change chart types, fiddle with the formatting, and save your results for later. It's a great tool, and worth checking out.

One huge caveat, though: You can't visualize data without uploading it to the Web site first, where it's shared as public information that anyone can use to explore the tool and make their own visualizations. So ixnay on using ManyEyes for proprietary business information. [via Lifehacker]