We’ve mostly been limited to static slides for our presentations in the past – especially when it comes to graphs – but Plotly and the Spectacle Editor are making it easy to make your data move.
You’re in a meeting showing off a graph, and all of a sudden Bob says “Can we zoom in on the third quarter’s earnings?” Bloody Bob, always trying to make things difficult.
This time, you’re prepared though. Plotly now supports interactive charts and graphs, so you can play around with the data however your audience wants you to. No more “I’ll get to that later”, or “I’ll have to send you that in an email”. The new, open-source Spectacle Editor lets you drop in Plotly charts and easily zoom in on sections of a graph by clicking and dragging, which will zoom on different axes according to whether you drag vertically or horizontally. A double-click will zoom out. You can see it in action in Google’s Quarterly Financials Presentation, and you can download the Spectacle Editor here.
You’re obviously not going to want to use it for your basic presentations with only text slides, as it looks like adding text is a little more difficult than usual. But if interactive data visualisation is what you’re targetting, then this is where it’s at. This feature seems like it’d really go great with the larger, 3D chart-porn that Plotly has been adding lately, that shapes large sets of data as galaxies you can zoom in on.
There are a few other updates as well, such as extensions to its new SQL functionality, and the ability to click and annotate on the fly, so when Bob asks if we can write a quick note on the previous data point, it won’t disrupt our flow.
Stupid Bob, with his stupid face.
Comments