Introducing Charts by Social Explorer
We are very proud to present a professional publishing solution that allows you to create eye-catching, custom charts and tables in a matter of minutes. Simply titled Charts, our new application lets users discover and highlight different trends, patterns, and exceptions. Whether it’s for a website, blog, report, presentation, slideshow, with Charts, you can design high-quality, professional looking charts quickly and easily. Here’s what you need to know to get started.
The Idea behind Charts
We live in a free-flowing data world where the volume of information is constantly on the rise. What we share and engage with today is more visual and dynamic than ever before. Let’s be honest — we would rather look at an image or a chart to get key points of information than boring spreadsheets full of numbers. That’s because as human beings, always edge towards visual information as we can process. In fact, we can get the sense of a visual scene in 1/10 of a second — the saying ‘a picture’s worth a 1000 words’ isn’t for nothing, right?
Completely Customizable
We wanted to create a data visualization tool that would allow you to tell you the whole story at a single glance and create visuals that stand out for all the right reasons. To achieve this, we had to make sure our charts convey much more than just the data they’re based on. So we made them completely customizable. They’re as flexible as you need them to be, and they allow you to customize everything from the fonts and colors to value labels and the axis.
Use colors to reinforce your brand image, add context, or point out important elements. Charts also comes with dozens of predefined themes for you to pick from if you don’t feel like diving into the nitty-gritty details of setting up a custom theme.
Fully Interactive
Once we made sure we had a tool that allows you to access all the relevant data and create meaningful charts that tell a story, the next step was to turn each chart into an immersive experience. In other words, we wanted to reimagine the dull textbook charts and see if we could kick things up a notch.
After all, a good chart will tell a story, but a great one will engage the audience. Our charts are fully interactive and you can allow your readers to make guesses right on your chart and compare their predictions to the actual data. Not only that, but they can gray out, emphasize, or completely remove a series from the chart to discover trends and outliers more easily.
Optimized For the Web and Mobile
Not so long ago, we were discussing how mobile was to overtake fixed Internet access. Today we’re well past that tipping point, and increasingly more content we consume comes from mobile devices. As a result, even things like charts and graphs need to be fully responsive in order to be effective. In Charts, you can control how every chart you create behaves on mobile devices, or display a different chart type on mobile devices to make sure your message comes across just as effectively as it does on desktop computers.
In addition, to ensure stability and faster response, our charts are published on Content Distribution Networks (CDN) on five different continents around the globe.
Team Oriented
Charts is a team oriented tool and it supports real-time collaboration. With our business plan, you can create teams and projects and collaborate with your colleagues without using a single USB drive or email. Easily share and access charts and work together on bringing your story to life without ever leaving Charts.
Supports Diverse Data Sources
In addition to creating a data visualization tool, we wanted to provide our users with all the data they need to tell compelling and engaging stories right off the bat. We first started with full access to all the Social Explorer data for our current users. This covers all the decennial census data, as well as American Community Survey, FBI, Eurostat, and the World Bank data, just to name a few sources. However, we also added Federal Reserve Economic Data as a source later on, as well as Google Sheets integration to allow data import right from your Google Drive.
Try it out!
And here we are! We’re confident we have created a professional tool that gets the job done — easily, efficiently, and intuitively. If you’re a Social Explorer user, you already have access to Charts. Just use your Social Explorer credentials to sign in. If you’re not a Social Explorer user, but you’d still like to give it a go, you can do it by signing up — it’s free!
