I’m giving into the hands of readers the most useful online tool I know — Many Eyes
The service is done by professionals — the team deals with issues of information design since 2003: Fernanda created service for visualization of mail archives, Martin made a utility for visualizing popular baby names.
The beauty of this work is that you can load the data and the service will recognize it — where text, where is percentage, and where — figure.
And then visualize it how you want. From what I used (again, what is not in Excel).
1. Variation of bubbles
2. Working with text — just tremendous opportunities to make a beautiful tag clouds and ligaments
3. Maps — I am just giving the images here and you’ll understand everything: you can put few maps together, add bubbles, play with brightness and zoom the region.
Only Java is periodically lagging and does not want to generate the things needed((
