Ask HN: What do you use to quickly generate charts & graphs?

At some point you get some data, and you want to graph it -- I'm curious what tools you reach for.

Interested mostly in the simple cases (let's say an XY graph, benchmark results, pie charts, etc), not exploration of the visual space per-say or trying to create a new type of visualization.

There are at least a few workflows I can think of but none are really satisfying/feel right:

- Open up LibreOffice/Excel/Google Sheets/Numbers, enter data, click around

- Open your terminal, try and remember gnuplot syntax

- Open a website like plotly and copy in your data

- Open up observable/ipynb or some other advanced notebook

What is everyone using?

On the startup front, it looks like of course companies like quickchart have been out there solving exactly this problem for 5 years already (that business has to be quite nice and profitable at this point!)

BTW, note that mermaid looks to include some simple syntax soon:

http://mermaid.js.org/syntax/xyChart.html

IMO once this new chart type percolates it's way into GitHub or other widely-used platforms that support markdown with mermaid, this problem is ~solved (at least for me) and that's what I'll use.