Google Visualization

Create Google visualizations straight out of Excel.

Here you can download a prebuilt application, googleCharts.xlsm that demonstrates how to integrate google Visualizations with Excel. The subsequent pages are about how to develop such an application and provides the tools you need to do it with. If you just want to try it, just before you do, please read the section below on enabling Flash on your local machine. It’s easy, and you need to do it.

Before we start – a note about Flash
Google uses Flash to display interactive charts. By default the Flash player is not able to access files that are held locally. Since you might be embedding these charts in your workbook, or using a browser to display local .html files, the default Flash settings will prevent you from displaying these local web pages. To get round this you need to first follow the instructions on the macromedia website for creating a trusted location for local, flash enabled files, and ensure that any .html files you created are stored there.

What is Google Visualization

These are a series of APIS provided by Google to allow you to produce sophisticated data visualizations. Generally speaking, the visualizations we will discuss are targeted to be embedded in googleDocs, or at least to be fed data from GoogleDocs. This section is dedicated to providing an easy access to these visualizations to Excel users and will provide downloadable examples with all the classes you need to create your own applications with minimal work, as well as to provide an introduction to Google visualization. You will also find prebuilt applications you can use right out of the box to embed charts and serialize Excel data. if you are interested in embedding Google Vizualizations in Google Maps, there is a parameter driven application on this site that does just that.

Google motion charts

A motion chart is a bubble chart with the added dimension of time.

Here are some tools and explanations to allow you to create google motion charts and serialized data from Excel. Note that the following examples have been superseded by a general tool that does everything including multiple chart types. However the write up should help to get a baseline understanding.

• Embedding Google Motion Charts in Excel – how to use the Google visualization library and create Google motion charts using Excel data.
• Serializing Excel data for Google motion charts – how to serialize your data for input to Google motion charts

Now that you have looked at a couple of examples of creating specific solutions for specific charts, lets look at a general purpose version. This will be a framework to create any kind of google visualization from your data.

• Serialize data for , or embed any kind of google visualization, using a general purpose class and an example application.

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