Data Visualization

Chartbuilder - Chart builder is an open source chart-creation tool that gives you an opportunity to create simple charts and "graphics-desk" quality. Visit: http://quartz.github.io/Chartbuilder/ and follow the simple steps. You’ll be able to export your chart afterwards.

Charticulator - Charticulator is a free online tool, from the Microsoft Research team, that allows you to create highly customizable interactive visualizations. The Charticulator Gallery also lets you browse visualizations and watch videos of the creation process. 

DataHero - DataHero is self-service cloud program that provides data analysis with intuitive design. The service suggests charts and drag-and-drop chart creation to make it easy to provide context to your data and communicate them with dashboards.

Datawrapper - This is a quick and easy way to create Web charts. Add data by copying and pasting from a spreadsheet or uploading a CSV file, (remove formatting: commas, percent signs and so on). Select from one of five chart types, type in a title and click publish.

Flourish - Flourish offers a selection of aesthetically-pleasing ready-made charts. It’s more suitable for data storytelling than for analysis, but it offers templates for basic visuals as well as for more advanced charts that may be difficult to create on other code-free visualization tools. 

Google Fusion Tables and Google Data Studio - This program helps you turn data into a chart or map. You can upload a file in several different formats and then choose how to display it: table, map, heatmap, line chart, bar graph, pie chart, scatter plot, timeline, storyline or motion (animation over time). It's somewhat customizable, allowing you to change map icons and style info windows. Google Data Studio facilitates easy creation of dashboards and charts, and enables users to collaborate on a report like in a Google document.

Microsoft Excel - Microsoft Excel is spreadsheet software developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. To create effective data visualizations, users should look beyond default chart types and customize their visualizations to better communicate their data.

Piktochart - Piktochart is a design tool that allows you to create infographics and dashboards, and input data to incorporate simple charts.

Plot.ly - Plotly is a data visualization cloud service that also performs statistical analysis not requiring a desktop download. The program allows for collaboration. Additionally, you maintain ownership of the data and can control privacy.

Qlik Sense Desktop (Program Download) - Qlik Sense Desktop allows you to create interactive data visualizations from data you keep on your own system. That's useful if you want to get insights from your own data, but less so if you want to share your work with others in your institution. However, Qlik Cloud allows you to privately share the data visuals with up to 5 other users who don't need Qlik Sense installed.

Tableau - Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool that can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click. A free academic license is available to students, instructors, and non-profit academic researchers. Publishing visualizations on the web requires a Tableau Public account. Public visualizations should not use private or personally identifiable information.

eSpatial - eSpatial online mapping software lets you to take business data from Excel spreadsheets and transform it into eye-catching, informative visualizations. Software plots any location that can be found in Google Maps. You'll be able to plot spreadsheet data and create heat maps, territory maps, analyze data, collaborate on data, or customize and style maps to share and print. 

OpenLayers - OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bing Maps. 

Quantum GIS (QGIS) - QGIS is a free, open source geographic information system. You'll be able to create, edit,visualize, analyze, and publish geospatial information on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD.