Tableau Public

With Tableau Public, large chunks of data can be presented in an easy to understand manner. You can take a huge spreadsheet and generate graphs, charts, tables and much more. The software allows you to import data from various sources and it gives you the possibility of creating presentations. Uploading data and sharing it over the Internet is another possibility.

The software is free and it is available for all popular platforms. Downloading its setup package and installing its components shouldn't take too long, even on a less than spectacular machine. The hardware requirements are modest and there is no need to install any prerequisite tools.

The user interface doesn't show much in terms of controls when you launch the program. It presents a few options, in a column, on its left side, which allow you to import data from Excel spreadsheets, Access files, text documents and from statistical files. Once you import a file, its data will appear on the same window, broken down and categorized just like in the original document.

While you have a file imported, you can start generating all sorts of graphs and charts on separate tabs. This is where the software shines the most, because it makes the process particularly easy and comfortable. Columns and values from the imported file can be found on the left side of the user interface and you only need to click them and drag them to the appropriate positions in a blank chart.

Charts are generated automatically, as you drop column and value names. Furthermore, you can switch between different graph types with a single click and you can also insert various analytics in your graphs, like average lines, medians, box plots and many others.

Thanks to Tableau Public's straightforward functionality, complex data structures can be made easier to understand in just a few minutes.