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Google Spreadsheet and Oo Calc
By maurizio | September 19, 2007
I wanted to add a chart on my stats page to show the length of tags and the distribution. I like to extract information from the data I’ve collected. The problem was how to show it. My first idea was to use php to show a chart but the only library I’ve found wasn’t that good because its main advantage (interaction) was disabled in the free version. (let me know if you know a good library to draw charts)
So I decided to add a simple Gif. I usually use OpenOffice to write and calculate so I tried with it first.
As you can see there is a big issue with the X description: too messy.
My second attempt was with Google Spreadsheet. Everybody is speaking about online office and stuff like that so I decided to give it a try. I already have an account on Google so it took a few seconds to open it. Actually it’s faster to load Google Spreadsheet than OpenOffice (and Excel). Google Spreadsheet is easy to use and it creates nice graphs, the problem is that it doesn’t add Axis Descriptions, so it’s even worse than OpenOffice.
At the end I tried with Excel and I got what I wanted. An easy to read Axis Description and a nice chart.
One thing is missing in all three: the ability of cutting out some part of the Axis. I don’t know how to explain it, but imagine that there are 20000 tags with a length of 400. If I want to show it in a graph, I’ll have a huge graph where most of the datas are flat (around 10-14 tags per length). The best way to show all is to have the graph shown above and from X=50 to X=390, instead of show the datas, just add [...] or something similar. That would be pefect for my examples.
Note that I have on my Db some tags longer than 100 characters. That’s because some people just copied the description into the keyword section. :(
Another reason is that there isn’t a specific rule on how to divide tags, so for example all myspace sites have the same tag which is a list of 10-12 tags. you can see on the page for F tags here. I’m not sure if I have to remove it or to split it. I should probably shorten it but not remove, because it will pollute the classification of all other tags and I don’t want that because Myspace tags are arbitrarily decided and that’s not good for my search engine.
Topics: Content Creation | No Comments »
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