SandDance is a free open source data visualization tool from Microsoft. Here it lets you visualize a tabular data with the help of interactive and beautiful charts. Not only that but it even lets you customize a few other parameters to make data more understandable. All the options are given on the online instance of this tool and you are free to use them. Since it is an open source, you can even grab its source code and run your own instance on VPS or any other private server. For installing this on your server, you are required to have technical knowledge and if you don’t have that then you can simply use the hosted online version of the tool.
There are many data visualization tools that you can use but SandDance here is very powerful one. It is fast, pretty, and offers you a lot of options to customize the view of the final data. The charts or graphs that it uses are very nice and you can see the 3D view as well as the charts viewer supports zoom and pan like operations. You can change the chart type instantly and for now it supports column, density, scatter, treemap, bar, and stacks charts. You can create these kinds of charts and then you can simply visualize any kind of data that you have.
SandDance is actually one of the cool projects from Microsoft Research. But now they have released it and as an open source tool. If you are interested in its source code then you can find that in this GitHub repository. It takes data from various kind of data files such as CSV, TSV, and top JSON. If you have some statistical data in these formats that you want to analyze then this tool will help you.
Free Open Source Data Visualization tool from Microsoft: SandDance
This is a very straightforward tool that you can use to visualize any kind of data. You simply go to its homepage and access the main web app and get started. If you just want to try the tool then you can use it with the sample datasets that it already have. Or, you can upload the statistical data that you have in any of the supported formats. In my case, I downloaded a population data from UN’s official website and uploaded here using the “Local file” option.
It will read the data and will render the chart accordingly. From the “Chart” section, you can change the chart type, column mapping, X axis bin size, Y axis bin size, and some others. You can see those options in the screenshot below. On the right side, it shows you the chart and you are free to use zoom, pan like operations to analyze that.
Next, you can move to the chart settings and then customize the size parameters of the chart such as inner padding, outer padding, scaling proportions, text scale, text angle, transition duration, and a few other options.
Finally, when you have your chart rendered on the main UI, you can export it as a PNG image. You can right click on the chart and then save it on your PC. It is simple as that. Or, there is a separate section on the main interface of the website where you can opt for the snapshot option.
So, in this way this data visualization tool from Microsoft works to visualize any kind of statistical data and do whatever you want. Without any sign or registration, you can get started with it and then simply visualize any data. You will like the interactive charts that it offers and its ability to zoom and pan on those. So, you just give it a try and then do whatever you want.
Final thoughts
SandDance is one of the best free data visualization that you can use right now. I liked the interface and its simplicity to help you quickly generate the charts for any kind of statistical data you have. It uses some most common type of file formats to read the data to plot the corresponding charts. So, if you are looking for an open source data visualization tool then you should give a try to SandDance.
