Survey Your Options
This isn’t a comprehensive list of what you can use to visualize data, but it should be enough to get you started. There’s a lot to consider and play with here. The tools you end up using largely depend on what you want to accomplish, and there are always multiple ways to accomplish a single task, even within the same software. Want to design static data graphics? Maybe try R or Illustrator. Do you want to build an interactive tool for a web application? Try JavaScript or Flash.
On FlowingData, I ran a poll that asked people what they mainly used to analyze and visualize data. A little more than 1,000 people responded. The results are shown in Figure 3-29.
There are some obvious leaders, given the topic of FlowingData. Excel was first, and R followed in second. But after that, there was a variety of software picks. More than 200 people chose the Other category. In the comments...