How To Add Charts And Graphs To WordPress

You’ve heard the old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This certainly applies when you’re trying to present or explain complex information.

Using graphs and charts is great for breaking up technical and difficult information, and making data more easily digestible.

You can use tables to present information, but if you want people to try and interpret complex information with numbers, trends or relationships easily, then graphs and charts are perfect for helping them visualize your information.

Graphs and charts help you present complex data so people can more easily understand it!

If you need to present information visually and dynamically on your WordPress site using charts and graphs, this tutorial will show you exactly how to create and add beautiful and updatable charts and graphs to your pages that:

• Your web visitors can engage with
• Lets you add graph or chart data from your computer or a web-based source of data
• Dynamically resizes for mobile screens

If you are displaying visual data like pie charts, comparison charts or trending graphs that contain static information (e.g. historical data), an easier option is to create your charts or graphs using an image editing application, convert these into images and then simply add the images to your web content.

Use WordPress Chart & Graph Plugins

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

Fortunately, there is a free plugin for WordPress users that is simple to install, easy-to-use and allows you to not only create attractive and mobile-responsive charts and graphs, it also lets you populate your charts and graphs with dynamic content.

Visualizer

Plugin URL

You can install the plugin from your WordPress dashboard (see a little further down the page), or access and download Visualizer here:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/visualizer

Visualizer Plugin Description

WP Visualizer is a simple, easy to use and powerful tool that allows you to create, manage and embed stunning and mobile-responsive charts and graphs into your WordPress posts and pages with a few mouse clicks.

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 additional plugins or add-ons are needed.

The plugin also comes with a variety of built-in that are optimized to address 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 flexible and customizable, allowing you to use Google Chart Tools with their default setting, or configure an extensive set of options to match the look and feel of your website. A number of options are available for each chart that let you fully customize their look and feel.

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 site visitors can see your charts and graphs on their mobile device browsers without requiring the installation of additional plugins.

Plugin Installation

From your WP admin area, 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 the entry in the search results section 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 page …

After your plugin has been activated, click on Library …

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

This brings up the plugin’s Visualizer Library section …

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

The next step is to add the charts and graphs to your library that you plan to insert into your content.

Plugin Configuration

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

You will see all of the built-in types of charts and graphs available.

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

Your graph/chart type will pop up in a new window.

The next step is to upload a CSV file containing all the data you would like to populate your chart or graph with …

When creating your CSV data file, ensure that:

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

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

If you are unsure about how to format your CSV file, simply refer to the sample that comes with the plugin.

Once you have created your CSV file, select your data source (‘From Computer’ or ‘From Web’) in the ‘Upload CSV File’ section.

Upload CSV File From Computer

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

Locate and select your data file and then click on ‘Open‘ …

The plugin will now import the data from the CSV file and display it using the graph/chart type 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, see the article below:

• How To Populate Data Using Google Spreadsheet

After importing the data, make sure 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 then click ‘Next‘ …

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

Visualizer gives you total control over your information, and updates your display in real time …

For example, the pie chart offers various configurable options, including:

• 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 satisfied with the way your graph or chart looks, click Create Chart …

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

Note that each element is given a unique ID displayed as a shortcode. As you will see in just a moment, this lets you easily insert charts and graphs into your content …

Charts and graphs added to the Visualizer Library can be accessed by their type …

After adding a new chart or graph to the ‘Visualizer Library’, you can edit its details, duplicate it, or trash it …

Visualizer Plugin Usage

After creating a new chart or graph and adding it to Visualizer, adding it to a post is really very 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 the content and click on the ‘Add Media‘ button …

Click on ‘Visualizations‘ …

Find the graph or chart you want to add to your content and click on the “insert” icon …

This will add a shortcode for the element into your content …

After you have finished adding the item, click on Publish to publish (or update) your post or page …

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

The chart will display in the content …

As mentioned earlier, the plugin also displays responsive charts for mobile viewers …

As you can see, WordPress Visualizer allows you to insert and customize dynamic charts and graphs in your content. You can edit your data and the changes will automatically be reflected wherever you have inserted your charts, graphs, comparison bars , etc. in your website. This makes working with interactive graph data in WordPress very efficient.

The developers of this plugin have created a number of tutorials you can refer to for ways to edit, customize and use Visualizer.

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

• WordPress Visualizer – Additional Tutorials

Congratulations! Now you know how to insert appealing and dynamic charts and graphs into WordPress with WP Visualizer.

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