I picked the tool because due to the fact that I generally dislike graphs, however, this tool surprised me with its utility. After testing it out and seeing its capabilities I will now call it the spork of the utensil/content world! This blog post will be focused on helping you see if this spork is the right tool for your lunch or if you should keep on eating with a fork or spoon.
The Spoon
Excel has long been the go-to for anyone ranging from the novice to CEO’s to show awesome charts and diagrams. This is because it is easy to use and has a wide range of abilities, much like the spoon. Throughout the world, the mighty spoon is used for all kinds of things, much like Excel. It is very intuitive and made for a broad audience, that has its greatest selling point is also greatest pitfall as it is unable to compete with sexy interactive charts made by programmers (aka forks). The simplicity of the spoon leaves it unable to cut down into deeper, more tasty meats.
The Fork
Javascript is the go-to language sought after by training programmers. This skill leads a programmer to pat his portfolio with snappy pieces aimed at getting them hired or consult for people who don’t understand coding. Much like the forks incredible ability to penetrate deep into foods and partnered with a knife you can cut through almost anything Javascript is a great way to cut deep into and enhance data and make more interactive. If you want to zest up your presentation you may want to throw some javascript in there, but the hard part is you will have to learn it or hire it out. Hence the lesson here, if you want the stab deep into data interaction, it comes with the price of a knife (knowledge).
The Spork
AmCharts is a wonderful combination of both the fork (javascript) and spoon (Excel). With their platform, you are able to create interactive charts with very little coding knowledge. They have a wide range of templates, charts, graphs and demos aimed at helping you to get a great deal of value out of their free version so you will be more likely to come to them for the priced version (a little bit of content marketing). You will be able to stab into the coding side of things with the prongs and scoop with ease the wonderful data-driven illustrations.