Trendalyzer (Motion Chart Gadget): Nice trends analysis tool by visualization

The other day I was seeing this nice presentation by Hans Rosling where he is presenting the different statistics of the developing world and how they changed over time. See his other talks on various topics.



I was largely impressed by the tool that he used in the presentation. It has a great visual appeal. It can represent different dimensions at the same time in the 2-D chart. Other than the regular X,Y axis it uses color, size, time to represent the other dimensions. The way one can drill down further into the statistics in a visual manner is very nice.

The software tool is developed by him and his colleagues at his non-profit organization "Gapminder". It was initially called Trendalyzer. Then google later bought this tool when the google founder saw this TED talk and was impressed by the software. Now, this software is available as a free gadget in spreadsheet in online google docs. Here is a tutorial on how to use this tool in google spreadsheet. Here is one more tutorial.

Hard disk usage visualization tool

Ever wondered how you are running out of disk space even when you have a large capacity hard disk. Its very likely that you have bunch of large files that you do not need anymore. Actually, I faced this problem even more because I have a small capacity hard disk. I am almost perpetually short of disk space. So, I have to be very optimal in its usage. Sometimes, I store large files somewhere and forget that they ever existed after the use. One of the things that I keep doing is to use disk cleanup tool in windows and remove temporary files. But that does not reclaim much space beyond few MBs.

One day I was very frustrated that I have to continuously hunt for unwanted files on my machine. When I turned to the net for a tool that helps me in this, I found this nice tool called "WinDirStat" which stands for "Windows directory statistics". Its is a nice tool that quickly gives a map of all the files in the disk. Its visual presentation is very good with color-coding and size-coding. It visually shows the file sizes occupied by files and the directories.

The files will be shown as rectangular boxes and the size of the box represents the relative size of the file. All the files in a directory will be given same color. If you put the cursor on the blocks, it shows the filename etc. With this tool, you can quickly identify the large files/directories in your disk and delete them if they are not needed. Or you can backup the large files and delete them from your disk. You can do some basic operations like opening, deleting, seeing properties etc directly from the tool. I feel that this is a very convenient feature.

Here is the list of other tools that are available in case you want to explore more.