How To Add Charts And Graphs To WordPress

You’ve heard the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This is certainly true when you’re presenting or explaining complex information.

Using graphs and charts is useful for making statistical data simpler to digest.

You can present data with tables, but if you want people to try and make sense of complex data with numbers, percentages or relationships more easily, then charts and graphs are perfect for helping them understand your data.

Charts and graphs help explain complex data so your audience can more easily interpret it!

Need to add charts or graphs to WordPress? This tutorial shows you how to use WordPress Visualizer – a simple, easy to use and powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to create, manage and embed dynamic charts and graphs into your WordPress posts and pages that:

• Your web visitors can engage with
• Allows you to upload data from your computer or a web-based source of data
• Will dynamically resize for mobile device browsers

If you are displaying visual data like pie charts, comparison graphs or trending graphs containing information that is not going to change (e.g. historical data), a simple method you can use to present this data is to create the charts or graphs using an image editing application, convert these into images and then simply add the images to your post or page.

Use WordPress Chart & Graph Plugins

If you want to easily create dynamic bars and pie graphs in WordPress with no coding skills required, the easiest way to do this is to use a plugin.

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

WordPress Plugin: Visualizer

Visualizer Plugin URL

You can install the plugin from your WordPress dashboard (see a little further below), or download WP 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 colorful graphs and charts into your WordPress posts and pages with a few mouse clicks.

The plugin 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 addons are needed.

WordPress Visualizer also contains a variety of built-in optimized for your data visualization needs, including:

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

The plugin is also flexible and customizable, 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 let you fully 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 site visitors can see your charts and graphs on their mobile browsers without having to install additional software.

How To Install The Plugin

From your WP dashboard, select Plugins > Add New from the main admin menu …

In the Add Plugins screen type search for “visualizer” and click enter …

Locate the entry in the search results area and click the “Install Now” button …

Click OK to proceed …

Activate the plugin after installing it …

You can also activate the plugin in the Plugins page …

Once your plugin has been activated, click on Library …

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

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

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

The next step is to add add charts and graphs to the plugin library.

Visualizer Plugin Configuration

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

A visual gallery displaying all of the built-in types of graphs and charts available will come up on your screen.

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

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

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

When creating your CSV data file, make sure that:

• Your first row includes the column headings.
• Your second row contains the series type (e.g. string, datetime, etc.)

The screenshot below shows how to format your data as required …

If you are not sure how to format your data CSV, simply study the sample spreadsheet provided 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 the CSV file and data from your computer select ‘From Computer‘ …

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

The plugin imports the data from the CSV file and displays it using the graph/chart type you have 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 your data, make sure that all of the information is correct (if not, click on the ‘Back’ button and reupload a data file with the right data), and click ‘Next‘ …

Depending on the chart or graph type you’ve selected, the plugin will display various customization settings …

Visualizer gives you complete control of your information, and updates your display in real time …

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

• General Settings – Configure chart title settings, 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’re satisfied with the look of your graph or chart, click on the ‘Create Chart’ button …

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

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

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

After an element has been added to the ‘Visualizer Library’, you can edit it, clone it, or delete it …

Visualizer Plugin Usage

After creating a new graph or chart and adding it to the Library, it’s very simple to add it to your posts and pages.

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‘ …

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

This inserts a shortcode for the element into your content …

Once you have finished adding the visual element, click on Publish to publish (or update) your post or page …

After the post has been updated, click ‘View post’ to see the results …

Your post or page will display your chart in the location you specified …

As mentioned previously, Visualizer also displays responsive charts and graphs for mobile browsers …

As you can see, the Visualizer plugin lets you add 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 is one of the great benefits of using the Visualizer plugin if you’re managing interactive graph data in WordPress.

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

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

• WordPress Visualizer – Additional Tutorials

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

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