Top 3 Interactive Data Visualization Examples

We all love interactive charts.

Yes, interactive graphs allow zooming, hovering, or picking a particular variable for emphasis.

These types of visualization designs align well with modern gadgets with touch screens, such as tablets, laptops, and presentation screens. Interactive data visualization examples are well suited for in-person or web data story presentations.

Google Sheets lacks ready-made interactive charts for your data stories.

You actually don’t have to do away with the Google Sheets spreadsheet. Supercharge its usability by installing a particular third-party application into your spreadsheet to access ready-to-use and visually appealing interactive data visualization examples, such as Sankey and Comparison Bar Charts.

In this blog, you’ll learn the following:

• The tested and proven interactive data visualization examples.
• What is an interactive data visualization?
• Data visualization techniques.
• Benefits of using data visualizations.
• Interactive data visualization examples.
• How to create interactive data visualizations?
• Also, we’ll suggest the best add-on to install in your Google Sheets to access ready-made interactive charts.

Top 3 Interactive Data Visualization Examples

Before delving right into the heart of the blog, we’ll address the following question: what is an interactive data visualization?

What is an Interactive Data Visualization?

Interactive data visualization is the use of modern software to directly manipulate and display insights in real time.

Compared to non-interactive visualization, user engagement is needed, such as clicking a button or moving a slider. The core of interactive data visualization is action and reaction, specifically human input and quick visual output.

Non-interactive data visualization is static and simple. Besides, it is more suitable for less complex data stories in which you only perform one or a few queries. Also, it’s the optimal format for printing and sharing reports via email, as the information is static in time and easy to view.

On the other hand, interactive data visualization examples are perfect for large amounts of data when you have more questions and a trend to investigate. Interactive data visualization examples, such as Sankey, enable you to fluidly answer questions and travel from one visualization to another.

Besides, it displays data in context, allowing you to easily find answers to your questions or hypotheses.

Interactive visualization examples are often used in dashboards, and business intelligence (BI) reports. They provide an easy way to understand insights and are more practical and time-saving than using long tables of numbers.

In the coming section, we’ll cover the benefits of using data visualizations.

Benefits of using Data Visualizations

Our brain processes visual information, such as charts, 60,000 times faster than poring over spreadsheets and data reports.

Visualization is a quick and easy way to convey insights to a broader audience. Make data visualization a habit in your organization to enjoy the benefits below:

• Quick and Better Analysis

Interactive data visualization examples make it amazingly easy to extract answers from your data to create compelling stories.

Imagine using the tables and spreadsheets to explain emerging patterns and other significant insights about a hospital to your audience.

 How would they respond? Would you get buy-in after presenting the table to them?

• Empowers Quick Action

Our brains grasp visual content, such as graphs and maps, 60,000 times faster than table reports.

And this means a compelling data story loaded with easy-to-interpret charts can empower quicker decision-making.

• Identifying Patterns and Trends

Bulky data provides unlimited opportunities for businesses to extract actionable insights. Yes, insights that could spell the difference between your brand and competition.

Visualizing data helps pinpoint relationships and patterns between metrics. Exploring these patterns enables you to save immense resources, such as time, by focusing only on areas that need urgent action.

• Errors

Interactive data visualization charts can help you easily spot errors in the data. Working with error-free data validates the accuracy of the insights extracted.

• Data Storytelling

The reason why we visualize data is to create data stories. Remember, poring over numbers in spreadsheets is monotonous, especially if you’re in front of an audience.

So, you need to create a compelling story with insights extracted from the raw data. People love stories. Yes, and this is because they appeal to emotions.

In the coming section, we’ll take you through tested and proven data visualization techniques.

Data Visualization Techniques

1. Ensure your data is clean

Before converting your raw data into an interactive data visualization, ensure the dataset is clean and reliable.

Data cleaning is the process of filtering out anomalies and inaccuracies present in your dataset. This process is essential to establish reliability.

2. Visualization should be audience-specific

Create interactive data visualization examples that are tailor-made for your audience for relevancy.

The aforementioned can easily scale your visualization from zero to hero. This makes sure that you not only create a visualization with a strategic purpose that answers a specific question but also one that can be easily understood by the audience.

3. Select the Right Chart:

Choosing the wrong chart type can easily confuse your audience or lead to inaccurate conclusions.

Always select an interactive data visualization chart that’s aligned with the attributes of your audience.

4. Label your data visualizations

Interactive data visualization examples can help you to identify hidden patterns and trends in data. For crucial specific metrics, use labels to place emphasis on signals over noise.

In the coming section, you’ll discover the top 3 interactive data visualization examples.

The Top 3 Interactive Data Visualization Examples

• Sankey Chart

You can use Sankey Charts to visualize data with flow-like attributes, such as material, energy, cost, etc.

This chart (one of the interactive data visualization examples) draws the reader’s attention to the enormous flows, the largest consumer, the major losses, and other insights. Besides, Sankey uses links and nodes to uncover hidden insights into relationships between critical metrics.

The size of a node is directly proportionate to the quantity of the data point under review.

A flow that’s twice as wide represents double the value of the metric. You need a reliable and easy-to-use data graph maker to access this visualization for data storytelling.

So, what’s the practical application of a Sankey Diagram?

You can use this phenomenal chart to visualize a broader range of data types in different industries, such as energy generation and transmission

• Radar Chart

A Radar Chart is a two-dimensional chart you can use to display two or more key variables on an axis that starts from the same point.

The chart is straightforward to understand and customize. Furthermore, you can show several metrics across a single dimension.

Radar charts are best used for showing outliers and commonalities in your data. You can use Radar Chart (one of the interactive data visualization examples) to display performance metrics, such as clicks, sessions, new users, and page views, among others.

Also, the graph can help you to display insights into different data points on a radial axis. The visualization design is often used to compare multivariate data sets.

You can plot the interactive data visualization in a Cartesian plane where the x-axis is wrapped around the perimeter.

• Comparison Bar Chart

A Comparison Bar Chart (one of the interactive data visualization examples) is a graph that uses composite-colored bars to show comparison insights in a specified period. The graph is ideal if your goal is to compare more than two key data points, such as daily price and volume.

One of the significant advantages of the chart is its incredibly easy to read and interpret.

Keep reading because, in the coming section, we’ll cover how to create interactive data visualizations.

How to Create Interactive Data Visualizations?

Google Sheets is a trusted data visualization tool because it’s familiar to many.

But the spreadsheet application lacks ready-made interactive data visualization examples, such as Comparison Bar Chart.

We understand switching tools is not an easy task. And this is why we’re not advocating you ditch Google Sheets.

There’s an easy-to-use and amazingly affordable visualization tool that comes as an add-in you can easily install in your Google Sheets ready-made interactive data visualization examples, such as Comparison Bar Chart. The tool is called ChartExpo.

So, what is ChartExpo?

ChartExpo is an incredibly intuitive add-on for Google Sheets you can easily install without watching hours of YouTube tutorials.

With many ready-to-go charts, the interactive data visualization generator turns your complex, raw data into compelling, easy-to-interpret charts that tell the data stories in real time.

More benefits. 

• ChartExpo is cloud-hosted, which makes it extremely light. You have a 100% guarantee that your browser won’t be slowed down.
• You can export your insightful, easy-to-read, and intuitive charts in JPEG, PDF, SVG, and PNG format.
• ChartExpo add-on is only $10 a month per user after the end of the trial period.
• The easy-to-use app has an in-built library with a lot of easy-to-customize and ready-made charts for your data stories.

In the coming section, we’ll take you through how to install and use ChartExpo into your Google Sheets.

You don’t want to miss this!

Example

This section will use a Comparison Bar Chart to display insights into the table below.

Quarters	Brands	Sales
Q1	Samsung	11
Q1	Apple	29
Q1	Huawei	20
Q1	Motorola	2
Q1	HTC	55
Q1	Sony	12
Q2	Samsung	16
Q2	Apple	8
Q2	Huawei	4
Q2	Motorola	3
Q2	HTC	12
Q2	Sony	15
Q3	Samsung	51
Q3	Apple	28
Q3	Huawei	4
Q3	Motorola	45
Q3	HTC	12
Q3	Sony	16
Q4	Samsung	20
Q4	Apple	13
Q4	Huawei	10
Q4	Motorola	14
Q4	HTC	20
Q4	Sony	15

To install the ChartExpo add-in for Google Sheets, click this link.

• Open your Google Sheets application.
• Open the worksheet and click the Extensions menu.
• Then click Charts, Graphs, & Visualizations by ChartExpo.
• Finally, click the Open button in the dropdown.

• Click the Add New Chart button to access your fully stocked library of charts.

• Once ChartExpo is loaded, you will see a list of charts. Look for “Comparison Bar Chart.”

• Select the sheet holding your data and select the Metrics Fill in the numerical numbers (in our case, we’ll use Sales).
• Select the Dimensions button and fill in the dimensional data (in our example, we’ll use Brands and Quarters), as shown below.
• Finish the simple process by clicking the Create Chart button.

• Check out the final chart.

If you hover the mouse over the colored bars, they’ll be highlighted automatically.

FAQs:

Why is interactive data visualization important?

Interactive data visualization is the use of modern software to directly manipulate and display insights in real time.

Compared to non-interactive visualization, user engagement is needed, such as clicking a button. The core of interactive data visualization is action and reaction, specifically human input and quick visual output.

What is the advantage of building interactivity in visualizations?

Interactive data visualization examples are perfect for large amounts of data when you have more questions and a trend to investigate. Interactive data visualization examples, such as Sankey, enable you to fluidly answer questions and travel from one visualization to another.

Besides, these charts are incredibly easy to decode.

Wrap Up

We all love interactive charts.

Yes, interactive graphs allow zooming, hovering, or picking a particular variable for emphasis.

These types of visualization designs align well with modern gadgets with touch screens, such as tablets, laptops, and presentation screens. Interactive data visualization examples are well suited for in-person or web data story presentations.

Google Sheets lacks ready-made interactive charts for your data stories.

So, what’s the solution?

We recommend you install third-party apps, such as ChartExpo, to access ready-to-use Interactive data visualization examples, such as Comparison Bar Chart.

ChartExpo is an add-on for Google Sheets that’s loaded with insightful and ready-to-go Interactive data visualization examples. You don’t need programming or coding skills to use ChartExpo.

More benefits. 

• ChartExpo is cloud-hosted, which makes it extremely light. You have a 100% guarantee that your browser won’t be slowed down.
• You can export your insightful, easy-to-read, and intuitive charts in JPEG, PDF, SVG, and PNG format.
• ChartExpo add-on is only $10 a month per user after the end of the trial period.
• The easy-to-use app has an in-built library with a lot of different easy-to-customize and ready-made charts for your data stories.

Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to access ready-made Interactive data visualization charts that are easy to interpret and visually appealing to your target audience.