Free tool for getting data and making graphs

I recently put a book on sale and paid for an ad campaign. Since I'm a software engineer in my day job, I was eager to explore the data after the ad ran, to see if I had good return on investment (ROI). I wanted to answer questions like:

• What percentage of sales came from each major e-book retailer?
• Did other books in the same series sell?
• How many books were downloaded from Amazon each day?

Happily, I know of a great tool to help me find answers--and it's free! The tool is called SAS Graphics Accelerator®. It's a Chrome plug-in with a lot of amazing features. I can:

• create data in the tool (by including CSV files or typing the data in manually)
• extract data from web pages by "scraping" them
• create all kinds of graphs, like bar charts, line plots, and pie charts
• share those graphs with others

The Accelerator is designed to help the visually-impaired (VI) to explore graphics, but sighted users can benefit, too. Each time you request a graph, it is produced twice:

• the typical visual way--the visualization view
• through sound--the sonification view--so that VI users can "hear" the graph

Let me show you what you can do!


Here's my first example--a time-series plot to discover how many book units per day were downloaded in the first half of January. I requested a CSV file of sales data from Amazon, imported it into the Accelerator, and generated this graph. It took me 5 minutes of clock time--start to finish.






This second example isn't about my book sales. It just demonstrates how to scrape data, in this case, about Major League Baseball. I found a wikipedia page that has data on the Home Run Derby. I asked the Accelerator to extract the data from a table about TV viewership--then generated a bar chart of the number of viewers per year. This graph only took 3 minutes from curiosity to answer. (Note: simple HTML tables can have their data extracted, but complex ones might not. You are warned if the data cannot be extracted.)


So, if you're ever interested in exploring data and want a free, fun, easy graphics tool to help, check out the Graphics Accelerator.


Disclaimer: This tool is provided by SAS--my day job employer. But I'm not trying to sell you something--because free!