I made a bar chart race in Flourish in 20 minutes
How do they make the bar chart move?! I still remember how shocking I was when I first saw this bar chart race video on Youtube about top-grossing movies of all-time.
The bars dynamically move up and down!
I was wondering how much effort will be needed to create such a lively chart.
And then recently, I came across Flourish.
What is Flourish?
Flourish is a web app that could “turn your spreadsheets into stunning online charts, maps, and interactive stories” according to their website. It is a freemium tool so you could try out yourselves easily.
I registered an account in 2 minutes, and at once got into their panel that let you choose from a bunch of templates. I scrolled down a little and found something very interesting called the bar chart race.
They let you start from what they called the ‘starting points’, which instead of building everything from scratch, you will see the result with some existing data. So in theory, you have made your first bar chart race at this point already. lol
I decided to try something simple. Since I am from HK, I quickly got into data.gov.hk and dug out an education level table. Now I have a CSV of 7 years of data.
By simple drag and drop, my table is uploaded to Flourish. On the left-hand side, it is my table. The most awesome thing here is you can CRUD! Add a new column, insert new values, remove unnecessary rows, you name it! This is something I have never experienced in other data visualization tools (yah I know, you can do it in Excel, yah I know.)
More interestingly, you could select labels, values, and categories on the right. Just input those values, and all of a sudden, your bar chart race is ready!
I timed myself for the whole process. From the register, login, getting the data, put it in Flourish, tweak a few settings to the final product, I literally used 20 minutes. This was a very amazing experience that you can now do so much with so little time and effort.
My work: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/1505707
Try it out yourself, and see if you can make the next 1M views Youtube video!
