Ask HN: Do you create data visualizations often?

4 points·andrewrn··4 comments

Does anyone else find styling charts in excel/gsheets to be really repetitive? Adding trendline, changing symbol shapes, adding gridlines, etc involves sifting through a ton of menus.

Seaborn/matplotlib helps but its still a lot of friction. I am considering making a tool to make it easier and curious if something like this would be useful for others.

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I used to hate matplotlib because of its awful API and awful API documentation. These days I just ask an LLM "add thousand separators on the y-axis", "add a vertical line ar zero" etc. and now I never need to look at the API documentation and it feels somewhat tolerable.

LLMs feel to me a nice fit here because there's just so much users might want to do with the chart styling. Past approaches that I've seen offer some kind of "quick selections" of common stuff and while they can help you get started, they quickly become annoying when you need to add some final tweaks not covered by the tool/API/whatever.

Hmmm, yeah. This is an interesting comment because the process you've described is essentially exactly what I am considering building. CSV + prompt -> chart. I've already done a few examples with LLM's generating structured data that renders to a SVG, but haven't tried it for charts yet. No doubt the majority of users would not be technical enough to work with matplotlib as you're describing, so I wonder if there is alpha in making something like this for total non-tech people.

Thanks for the input!

I think there's an opportunity there.

Do you have a use-case?

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