Google Visualization API Essentials

Make sense of your data: make it visual with the Google Visualization API

Overview

• Wrangle all sorts of data into a visual format, without being an expert programmer.
• Visualize new or existing spreadsheet data through charts, graphs, and maps.
• Full of diagrams, core concept explanations, best practice tips, and links to working book examples.

In Detail

There’s a lot of data in our world, and visual representations are often the best method of making sense of it all. Yet, it should not take an army of programmers and analysts to create visualizations in order to make data useful. The Google Visualization API is accessible to novice and advanced programmers alike, making data useful to more people.

“Google Visualization API Essentials” will show you how to create interactive data displays with very little code. The API, combined with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables, is a complete system, from data management to analytical displays. Not only is it simple to learn, but the Google Visualization API can also be viewed as a first step to learning additional Google APIs.

“Google Visualization API Essentials” uses both methodology overviews and hands-on examples with real data to introduce chart and graph creation on the Google platform. Topics are presented from various aspects, including Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables, and Graphic User Interfaces. An overview of the various API development environments available to developers is also covered. Basic and advanced charts, data source connectivity, style formatting, and publishing options are also explored in depth.

“Google Visualization API Essentials” brings the arsenal of Google Visualizations into the web developer toolkit.

What you will learn from this book

• Quickly launch a graph, chart, or map as an application, without the heavy-duty development environment.
• Create a variety of interactive graphs from spreadsheet or database data.
• Learn the Google API environment through Visualizations, and then apply the same concepts to other Google APIs.
• Give users control over data viewing with Interactive Chart Dashboards, or let them style the visualization themselves with Chart Editor.
• Discover Google Refine, a data-cleaning tool not just for visualization data.
• Use Google Fusion Tables as a Google Map data source.
• Embed a visualization in Google Spreadsheets using Apps Script API integration.
• Customize visualization colors, fonts, titles, and chart styles.
• Visualize your data over time with timeline and animation features.

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial full of diagrams, core concept explanations, best practice tips, and links to working book examples.

Who this book is written for

This book will show you how create web-ready data visualizations using Google’s infrastructure. Some HTML knowledge is the only requirement, although some JavaScript knowledge is also helpful.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Tools and Setup
Chapter 2: Anatomy of a Visualization
Chapter 3: Spreadsheets, Charts, and Fusion Tables
Chapter 4: Basic Charts
Chapter 5: Formatting Charts
Chapter 6: Data Manipulation and Sources
Chapter 7: Dashboards, Controls, and Events
Chapter 8: Advanced Charts
Chapter 9: Publishing Options