How To Add Charts And Graphs To WordPress

You’ve no doubt heard the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This is certainly true when you are presenting and explaining complex data.

Charts and graphs can help to break up content that contains too much text, and make technical data more easily digestible.

You can use tables to present information, but if you want your audience to try and interpret complex data with figures, percentages or relationships more easily, then charts and graphs are perfect for helping them understand the data.

Charts and graphs help you explain complex information so people can more easily understand it!

If you need to display dynamic visual content on your WordPress site using graphs and charts, this step-by-step tutorial will show you how to create eye-catching and updateable charts and graphs to your WordPress pages and posts that:

• Your site visitors can interact with
• Lets you upload graph or chart data from your hard drive or an online source of data
• Is responsive for mobile users

If you plan to display visual data like bar charts, comparison graphs or trending graphs that contain static information (e.g. historical data), a simple method you can use is to create your charts or graphs using a desktop application, convert these into images and then simply insert the files and an image into your page or post.

Use WordPress Chart & Graph Plugins

If you want to embed interactive bar charts and graphs into WordPress with no coding skills required, the easiest way to do this is to use a plugin.

Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin that is simple to install, easy-to-use and allows you to not only create eye-catching and interactive charts and graphs, it also lets you populate your charts and graphs with updatable content.

Visualizer – WP Plugin

Visualizer URL

You can install the plugin in your WP dashboard (we explain how to do this further down the page), or download WordPress Visualizer here:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/visualizer

Visualizer Plugin Description

The Visualizer plugin is a simple, easy to use and powerful tool that lets you create, manage and embed stunning graphs and charts into your WordPress posts and pages with just a few simple steps.

Visualizer uses Google Visualization API to render charts, which support cross-browser compatibility (adopting VML for older IE versions) and cross-platform portability to iOS and new Android releases, and are based on pure HTML5/SVG technology (adopting VML for old IE versions), so no extra add-ons are required.

WordPress Visualizer also provides a variety of charts that are optimized to address all your data visualization needs, including:

• Line chart
• Area chart
• Bar chart
• Column chart
• Pie chart
• Geo chart
• Gauge chart
• Candlestick chart
• Scatter chart

Visualizer is a flexible and customizable plugin, allowing you to use Google Chart Tools with their default setting, or configure an extensive set of options to match your web design. A number of options are available for each chart that allow you to further customize their look.

Additionally, charts are rendered using HTML5/SVG technology to provide cross-browser compatibility (including VML for older IE versions) and cross platform portability to iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Your visitors can see your charts and graphs on their mobile device browsers without having to install any extra software.

How To Install Visualizer

From your WordPress dashboard, select Plugins > Add New from the navigation sidebar menu …

In the Add Plugins page type in “visualizer” into the search field and hit enter …

Locate Visualizer in the search results screen and click Install Now …

Click OK to go ahead …

Activate the plugin after successfully installing it …

You can also activate the plugin in the Plugins section …

Once your plugin has been activated, click on Library …

You can also get to the plugin’s ‘library’ screen by selecting Media > Visualizer Library from your admin menu …

This brings up the plugin’s Visualizer Library settings screen …

When you first install the plugin, this section will be empty.

The next step is to add the charts and graphs to your library that you plan to display in your pages and posts.

Plugin Configuration

To add a chart or graph to the library, click on Add New …

You will see all of the default types of graphs and charts available.

Select the graph or chart type you would like to create and click on the ‘Next’ button …

Your selected graph/chart type will open up in a lightbox.

The next step is to upload a CSV file that contains your data …

When creating your CSV data file, ensure that:

• Your first row contains the column headings.
• The second row contains the series type (e.g. boolean, timeofday, etc.)

The screenshot below shows how to format your data as explained above …

If you are not sure how to format your data CSV, just use the sample spreadsheet that comes with the plugin.

Next, select your data source (‘From Computer’ or ‘From Web’) in the ‘Upload CSV File’ section.

Upload CSV File From Computer

To upload your CSV file and data from your computer select ‘From Computer‘ …

Use the browser to locate and select your file and then click on ‘Open‘ …

The plugin will now import your data and display it using the graph/chart type you have previously selected …

Upload CSV File From The Web

To learn how to create, save and publish data to a Visualizer chart or graph using Google Spreadsheet, go here:

• How To Populate Data Using Google Spreadsheet

After importing your data, check that all of the information is correct (if not, click on the ‘Back’ button and reupload a new data file with the correct data), and click ‘Next‘ …

Depending on the chart or graph type selected, the plugin displays a number of customization settings …

The plugin gives you complete control over your information, and updates your display in real time …

For example, the pie chart offers many configurable options, such as:

• General Settings – Configure settings for the chart’s title, font styles, tooltip, and legend.
• Pie Settings – Create 3D pie charts, draw slices counterclockwise, set the text content displayed on the slice, create a “donut” pie chart, rotate the chart’s “start” angle and set the slice border color.
• Residue Settings – Set the ‘Visibility Threshold’ (the slice relative part, below which a slice will not show individually.), ‘Residual Slice Label’ (the label for the combination slice that holds all slices below slice visibility threshold, e.g. “Other”), and ‘Residue Slice Color’.
• Slice Settings – Customize the ‘Slice Offset’ (how far to separate a slice from the rest of the pie), and ‘Slice Color’.
• Layout & Chart Area – Configure the layout (total size of chart) including the width and height of the chart as a number of percentage, background color for the main area of the chart and the chart border width and color, and the placement and size of the chart area (where the chart itself is drawn, excluding axis and legends).

Once you are happy with the look of your graph or chart, click Create Chart …

Your chart or graph will be added to your Visualizer ‘Library’ …

Note that new elements are given a unique ID displayed as a shortcode. As you will see in just a moment, this allows you to easily insert charts and graphs into your content …

Graphs and charts added to the Visualizer Library can easily be accessed by type …

After adding a new item to the ‘Visualizer Library’, you can edit it, clone it, or delete it …

Visualizer Usage

Once you have created a new element and added it to Visualizer, adding it to a post or page is really simple.

First, create a new post or page (or open an existing one) …

Next, place your mouse cursor where you want to insert your visual element into your content and click on Add Media …

Click on ‘Visualizations‘ …

Find the chart or graph to be added to your content and click the “insert” icon …

This inserts a shortcode into your content …

After you have added your visual element, click on Publish to publish (or update) your page or post …

After publishing the post, click ‘View post’ to see the result …

You will see the chart in the location you specified …

As mentioned previously, Visualizer also displays responsive elements for mobile viewers …

As you can see, the Visualizer plugin lets you add and customize dynamic charts and graphs in your content. You can change your data and the changes will automatically be reflected throughout your site. This makes working with dynamic graph data in WordPress really easy.

The plugin developers have created a number of tutorials you can use to learn how to edit, customize and use the plugin.

For additional tutorials on editing, cloning, deleting and adding data to your charts, refer to the website below:

• WordPress Visualizer – Additional Tutorials

Congratulations! Now you know how to easily create attractive and dynamic pie charts and graphs in WordPress with WP Visualizer plugin.

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