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Kevin William David

Explore by Charts.com - Free chart maker & visual exploration for spreadsheet data

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This tool takes in your spreadsheet data (CSV, Google Sheets, Excel in Dropbox etc.) and helps you create charts, visually explore data, create dashboards, sync them with live data, and export PDFs. On the data side, it allows you to create segments, conditional and calculated fields and more.

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Pallav Nadhani
Maker
Hi everyone, I’m Pallav from Charts.com. We’ve made this free tool to help business users and analysts alike, who need to “analyze” their data in spreadsheets, and not just “visualize” as charts. And, further to share the analysis with others (without exposing underlying spreadsheet); or consume and act on data themselves. What this tools enables is: - Quick visual exploration of data (spreadsheets), in-browser without installing anything - Enabling business operations on data (automatic/intelligent date-time grouping, segments, calculated/conditional fields) typically required during analysis, without needing deep expertise in spreadsheets. - Less “form-driven”, more “visual-driven” exploration (lesser cognitive load, and more lazy exploration). Be it drill-downs from chart point to grid to see filtered underlying data, perform sum/avg on specific or multiple points on chart through selection, see co-relation between between different measures on chart through interactions etc. (Though some items right now, like filters, are still form-driven and we’re exploring what can be done better!) - Easier self-consumption of data without having to open multiple spreadsheets. Viewing live data from different spreadsheets in a consolidated place (single dashboard), without having to open all of them. And automatic refresh of data. - Collaboration with others by sharing charts, dashboards (along with narratives) with others else in team (chart/story with narrative), without the need to share underlying spreadsheets. We’ll building towards speed and efficiency of getting insights from spreadsheet data, very quickly and easily. Would love to get your feedback.
Hans Dekker
Ah and forgot to ask: do you have more data source integrations planned? If so, which ones and what's the timeline?
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@hans_dekker Currently (for this quarter), our approach is to stick to spreadsheet data. The reason being: there are enough tools to help you get your data into Excel/Google sheets and do joins there, post which you can feed that sheet into Explore. We're working on building connectors to cloud databases, but that's for next quarter. As of now, we do not intend to build connectors (yet!) to SaaS apps (again same reason, you have tools which can bring such data into a Google Sheet, which you can then feed to Explore). Hope this works for you.
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@hans_dekker Btw, which connectors would like us to build?
Vasilii Ushakov
As for many similar products the only question was: is it better than MS Office solutions? Based on the sample dashboard I can say that in one important thing it is better than both Excel and PowerPoint: when you tap on the data point on the chart, the tool shows you all information about this element. It is very useful for people who work with a huge amount of data. So, because of this feature, I can give an upvote Maybe I didn't use enough the tool, but I didn't find any other important features. It is very limited in comparison with excel in data analyzing and with PowerPoint in data visualization. And I also couldn't upload my personal file to this tool :(
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@vasilii_ushakov Thanks for your feedback. We’re not building a Office replacement - but rather something that can be used in conjunction with your spreadsheet. The goal is help users quickly analyze, through visual exploration, of data contained in spreadsheet. Some of the things that you can do in Explore more easily are: - Do quick date-time aggregations/operations on data and visualize - Do quick aggregations on data (sum/avg/min/max etc.) in one click, through visualizations - Go from chart to data-grid quickly (visual filtering), and/or add manual filters - Create ‘virtual’ segments of data and run the same created chart across those segments to analyze - Enable multi-faceted charts (cross tab), heat maps etc for visualization - Allow you to start with data, and keep exploring what visual works best for analysis - Compare 2 dimensions (Date vs Date, Category vs Category) with a measure - Automatically binning for histograms - Bring data from multiple spreadsheets (across G-Sheets, Excel, Dropbox) add add to single dashboard; to monitor your metrics and refresh them in one-click. This saves you effort to open each spreadsheet, and easier to share. - And more things, which are relevant again to analysis of your spreadsheet data. Sorry to hear your data couldn’t be loaded - can you pls send me to at pallav [at] charts.com
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@vasilii_ushakov And also, quick to load, in-browser, no login required, export of dashboard as PDF :)
Hans Dekker
This is awesome from so many perspectives! First of all as a marketer I love how you're using a free tool for lead-gen and growing your traffic. Great job! Then again as a marketer, I can see myself using this for a ton of purposes. Data Studio is way too sluggish and slow for me and this is a great lightweight alternative for most of the stuff I'm looking to do. One small bit of feedback: when I go to change the chart type and click 'KPI', I can no longer go back to picking a different chart type. Great job and good luck team!
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@hans_dekker Thanks Hans for the feedback. Yes, the intent was to build something that people can use quickly and do with most business-operations-on-data, without learning curve. W.r.t KPI, it's meant for showcasing 1 measure only. When you add another measure in x/y axis, it'll give you options for more chart types. Though, we'll take this as an input and figure out how to keep all options ready.
Hans Dekker
@pallavn appreciate the swift response. Yup, that worked. For users just browsing and exploring their options that might be a bit unclear. Best of luck!
Supratik Basu
Really liked the product- especially the feature for drag and place/resize the chart/text. Would love to have feature for arranging the charts in a layout. Currently I cannot provide custom breathing space etc. And also export as html/css code for making custom dashboards would be great. Great work team _/'\_ All the best!
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@supratik_rulz In the dashboard layout, you can move charts around. See a video @
- what is your case for CSS/HTML export?
Supratik Basu
@pallavn saw that but it's not too configurable right now- breathing space, colors, shadows etc. CSS/HTML export will allow us to integrate the dashboard page into our website/application. Think like kind of showing interactive charts as stats in a part of application.
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@supratik_rulz Ok - as of now not building for that use-case; as focus is on business users. But will add to wishlist.
Colin Winhall
As often as I visit product hunt (several times a day) I very rarely upvote a product.... but when I do... it's something like this! Would love to talk further about the embed feature, as without it, it becomes much less useful for me for nocode projects. :)
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@colinwinhall Thanks a lot Colin for your endorsement. Would love to discuss the embed feature - I'm at pallav [at] charts.com
Robin C
Make it compatible with Zapier
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@robin_cagnon_carbonne1 Would love to understand how you would like to connect to Zapier? What zaps and data streams?
Mike
This is stunning guys, well done! The 'see another view of this data' is especially neat. Switching between charts is a tad sluggish but I'm sure this will be improved.
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@humanismusic_ Yes Mike, we're working on performance improvements. Thanks a lot for your feedback.
Chuck Kahn
I tried importing the csv from my Laser Egg but it had too many lines. Any other visualization tips for viewing Laser Egg data? ("Warning: The data that you’re importing has 13995 rows. This may slow down Explore, as currently we run the entire app in your browser. We recommend loading less than 2000 rows in the current version of Explore.") https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Pallav Nadhani
Maker
@chuckkahn Chuck - currently, the entire data is parsed and stored in browser itself. As such, we're not supporting large datasets. You can still load that size of dataset, but it may slow down the application. In the coming months, we've plans to make this more performant.