It would be remiss of me not to also review Swivel, another online, chart sharing solution, similar to Many Eyes, but not as fully-fledged as Tableau Public. One thing I immediately liked were the built-in connections to data sources. Within two clicks I was able to extract data from my Google Analytics account. Swivel then creates a default report from these data – that part wasn’t so great – it seemed to be a mash-up of every chart type possible with color distributed with wild abandon.

The default view notwithstanding, there are nice editing options for the charts – the tooltips and visual clues about individual data points are very good. The chart options are the standard basic types, and I feel that Swivel is a quick way to throw a bar chart or pie up onto a website. There are no ways to interact with the data to the same extent you can with Many Eyes (I’m not going to compare Swivel to Tableau – they are completely different animals). The method of embedding is much nicer than Many Eyes, making the chart look much more part of your website and not requiring Java. See below for an example (not my chart).