Raw: the missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics | Hacker News Reader

Raw: the missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics

raw.densitydesign.org

94 pointsco_pl_te27 comments

I suggest making the landing page a bit more clear... I sat there looking at the single sentence thinking, "What?" It's not so much a missing link between anything, as it is a way to create visualizations from your spreadsheet data, if you feel comfortable enough to paste it on a random website.

I felt similar confusion when I read that slug.

"Create visualizations from your spreadsheet data"

That's what this does. The "missing link" cliché didn't score any points with me, but the product looks extremely cool.

One other point of feedback, I clicked the "How it works" link, and when the page scrolled down, the animation was already on step 4, but that text is small, so I didn't realize I was watching the last step. I was a bit confused.

Maybe consider using a scroll position detection library to hold the animation until the user has it in view, or use something more clear to indicate which step is being illustrated:

[1] 2 3 4

1 [2] 3 4

1 2 [3] 4

1 2 3 [4]

For me the missing link would be a clean way of getting Excel data into a format that could be read by my D3 scripts without needing custom macros, exporting to Excel's flaky CSV format and a manual reload at the end.

Writing the graph code is the FUN bit.

Why are you using Excel and not .txt or .csv directly?

One good reason would be (as he says) that it is flaky. eg how does it handle newlines, commas, tabs and non-ascii characters in data? I've had to pull dirty data between systems before, and csv as the lowest common denominator tends to be lossy as there's no spec on this stuff. Some systems (eg oracle's csv import) do support forms of escaping, but they're not interoperable.

I see they support other file formats & json here, but a nice to have would be to use the google spreadsheet url: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/spreads...

Grabbing data directly from Office365 is also possible: http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/consuming-odata-feed...

The worst thing is that I work in a bilingual office. Excel's export to CSV does not work as intended when you have more than one number format.

I mean that I want to use Excel as a spreadsheet and use its contents to drive a D3 diagram without the current hassle of getting the data out of Excel into a format that D3 can read cleanly (and continuously - if I update the spreadsheet, the diagram should also update).

Absolutely. There is also no clue that the page should be scrolled down. And the video tutorial should be featured on the landing page.

    Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1048576) (tried to allocate 12288 bytes) in /var/www/raw.densitydesign.org/public/wp-includes/option.php on line 553

My startup's in a similar space: http://getbulb.com (beta is invite only for the next couple of weeks, but if you're curious and want a go, fire an email asking to info@getbulb.com, free to use currently)

I adore Density Design's work, and some of it was inspiration for what I'm doing now, so seeing this kind of thing is both validating & scary!

You know what's really crazy about this project? They have two guys named giorgio, on a four man team.

But seriously, this project looks pretty cool. It's an interest way to create quick visuals without writing any code.

Giorgio is a pretty common name in Italy, where the team is :)

Interesting. I figured if I did a bit of research, I might find something like that to be the case.

Anyone else getting a 503 error when trying to access the service?

Yes, same here.

All the more reason to just clone it and try it out ;-) It's pretty awesome, actually. Clone it then just npm install -g bower && (make sure bowser is in your path) && npm install && npm start

Hi from Italy, nice job!

To be a little nitpicky: why did you start with obscure high-dimensional visualizations such as alluvial plots, dendrograms, sphere packings? I believe there is much value in the classics: bar charts, histograms, scatter plots; one should only move to more complex visualizations if there is absolutely no way to use a simple one.

This is fantastic! I simply created 3 graphs based on email client data featuring a dendogram, circular dendogram, and circular packing. It charts the relationship of OS, device type, email client type, and client name. http://minus.com/m5VsIg2QvP2R3

How did you make that really cool animation on the homepage? I have been attempting to do this myself with javascript setTimeout mixed with css3 animation but its freakin awful, because it's one just massive callback inside a callback. it must be indented like 60 times near the end of my animation.

To handle the callback pyramid of doom, look into javascript promises.

Another option is using a timeline based tool like Sencha's Animator: http://www.sencha.com/products/animator

maybe https://github.com/caolan/async is the answer?

A very high tech animated gif.

Nice. But the biggest problem of spreadsheets is sharing and organizing data between multiple users, think github for spreadsheets. These visualizations are very good, but they are not a "hair on fire" kind of problem for most of the spreadsheets users.

Nice project, but the name is terrible IMO, in terms of being overly generic and possibly ungooglable - it's painful enough to sort out crap when looking for RAW image troubleshooting.

Looks really neat! Any plans for more data formats other than csv? Also, service is down... must be all that hn traffic :)

"Dendogram" should be dendrogram.

Site is down now, so I'll check it out later. Is this kind of a plug-and-play version of d3.js?

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