Making Charts with Infogram

Transcription

1 Making Charts with Infogram In this lesson, you will learn how to make several basic interactive charts with an online tool called Infogram. First, download and open the Excel file infographics_data.xlsx. Then log into Infogram.com using your Twitter handle. (When you do charts for CNS, you will log into Infogram with the VCU CNS Twitter account.) Tell Infogram you want to make a chart. (Don t click on Infographic template. In Infogram s terminology, an infographic is like a poster.) When you click on Chart, Infogram will show you this:

2 This interface is asking what kind of chart you want to create. So let s look at the first worksheet of our data: This data is about how RVA s population has grown since the last census. It gives a complete breakdown of how the Richmond metro area gained 72,765 residents. In this case, the data adds up to 100 percent to the whole; it accounts for all new residents. So this data would make a good pie chart. Each category would be a slice of the pie, and readers can easily compare the size of the slices. So, scroll down and find the different pie charts Infogram can do:

3 Let s create a traditional pie chart. Click on it, and it will appear on the canvas:

4 This is what I like about Infogram: You can see exactly what you are creating. But this pie chart has Infogram s dummy data ; we need to replace it with our data (about RVA s population). So double-click on the pie on the canvas, and Infogram will display a data sheet with the dummy data:

5 Select the dummy data and hit your delete key: Go back to your spreadsheet and select the good data. Select the column headings (Category Residents) and the three rows (natural increase, international migration and domestic migration). Don t select the total new residents row.

6 Copy that data to your clipboard and paste it into the data sheet on Infogram: When you do that, the chart will adjust automatically. At this point, we ve finished with inputting data. So double-click on the chart, and we ll adjust some of the chart settings. If you cursor over the slices of the pie, you ll see that the numbers don t have comma separators:

7 So on the right-side menu, under Data format, change the Numeric format to the option with a comma: Let s get Infogram to show the percentage each slice represents, too. That option is under Chart properties:

8 It s a little tricky, though: First, turn on Show callouts ; then, turn on Callout percentage ; then turn off Show callouts : We could do other formatting, too: change the colors of the pie slices; change the font; turn off the legend (if we decided to use the callouts putting the names of the pie slices right on the pie). But let s not do any of that now. Instead, let s add some text to our chart. Click on the Add text button on the left side of the interface:

9 Drag the H1 Title box to the top of your chart: Get the text from the spreadsheet and paste into the Infogram title box:

10 Then drag the H2 Subtitle box from the Add text palette and drop it below the title: You can use the text from the spreadsheet as your subtitle. I usually shrink the font size of the subtitle to 20 points:

11 And finally, put a caption at the bottom of the chart:

12 For the caption, use the source line from the spreadsheet. You can change the color of the text and add a hyperlink: Give your chart a title: Now we re ready to publish. Click on the Share button and then on Publish:

13 That will give you a URL your chart will exist as a stand-alone webpage as well as the embed code for posting this on a website.

14 To delete your chart, go to your Infogram library:

15 Click on the three dot menu for the chart you want to delete, and select Delete:

16 After you create a pie chart, let s do some other kinds of charts. In the Excel file, you will see a spreadsheet labeled column or bar. This is salary data for the highest-paid college football coaches. The data is for a snapshot in time (2017); and it doesn t add up to 100 percent (because it s just a handful of coaches not every coach in the U.S.). So this data would lend itself to a column chart or a bar chart. If you have a lot of items, a bar chart can look very cramped: When that happens, click on the gray area to the right of the chart and change the Width to 750 or 800 pixels:

17 Click on the chart, and you can format the numbers correctly: Here s how this would look as a horizontal bar chart (which is a better chart type when you have a lot of items):

18 Go back to the spreadsheet and get the data for line chart 1. This is data over time ; it shows how many home-schoolers there were in Henrico County for each school year since When you have data over time, you would do a line chart like this:

19 The data for line chart 2 provides population numbers over time for five Virginia localities.

20 Initially, when you paste that data into Infogram your chart will look like this: Yikes! Basically, Infogram thinks your rows are columns and your columns are rows. There s an easy fix: Click on this Transpose button on the data sheet:

21 When you do that, your chart will look like this: I ve also provided data for a stacked bar. Your chart will look like this:

22 The Excel file also has data for a grouped bar chart: Infogram also does maps. I ve provided data for two kinds of maps a heat map and a thematic (grouped) map. See if you can figure out how to get Infogram to display the data on a map of the U.S.