If you enjoy visually displaying data and/or creating charts and graphs but think that using Excel is overwhelming, then you are going to just love the Online Chart Tool, a web resource that allows users to easily design and share a wide variety of visual aids—line and bar graphs, pie charts and scatter plots to name a few.

The Online Chart Tool site is extremely user friendly. If fact, after completing a few steps which consist of selecting a graph type, entering data and choosing colors and fonts, users can download the finished product in one of the following formats: png, jpg, pdf and csv. Charts and graphs can also be shared via email or on your favorite social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

What’s even better? Online Chart Tool users are not required to create an account; however, users have the option to register for one if they wish to have the ability to save and edit their charts.

Check out an example I created using data from the Clustrmap associated with this blog.

Classroom Connection:

Graphs and charts are an important part of our every day life. In fact, they are everywhere in this information generation. That said, instead of just teaching students how to read, interpret and analyze these visual aids, use the Online Chart Tool to show students how to collect, organize and display one or more sets of data. For example, challenge your students to conduct research (i.e. favorite candy bar of classmates) and then have them utilize the Online Chart Tool to create a visualization of their findings.

In addition to a number of applications for the math classroom, the Online Chart Tool would be an excellent tool for any student (or teacher) that needs to create a data visualization for use in presentations, documents, digital projects and/or web sites, wikis and blogs.