

Raw: the missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics - co_pl_te
http://raw.densitydesign.org

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gfosco
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.

~~~
teamonkey
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.

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

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bazzargh
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...](https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/spreadsheets#Google_Spreadsheets_as_a_Data_Source)

Grabbing data directly from Office365 is also possible:
[http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/consuming-odata-
feed...](http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/consuming-odata-feeds-from-
excel-services-2013-in-powerpivot/)

~~~
teamonkey
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.

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nonchalance

        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

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OliverM
My startup's in a similar space: [http://getbulb.com](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!

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shortstuffsushi
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.

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danmaz74
Giorgio is a pretty common name in Italy, where the team is :)

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

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

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davvid
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

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carlob
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.

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chadyj
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](http://minus.com/m5VsIg2QvP2R3)

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TallboyOne
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.

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paultannenbaum
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](http://www.sencha.com/products/animator)

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kfk
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.

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zalew
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.

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

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ksrm
"Dendogram" should be dendrogram.

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

