I've just started the second and final week of BIG DATA: DATA VISUALISATION course through Future Learn. It's a free online course and I get to try some new software for creating graphs and other visualisations. Last week was mostly theory looking at design, user needs some historical background and lots of examples to critique.
There is a lot of theory about big data and sophisticated techniques, but of course when introducing a new piece of software it's best to try something simple.
So here is what I produced with Matlab.
I'm not sure what is in the next activity of the course so maybe there will be some enhancements to this. Anyway I'd like if the numbers were actually the names of months.
For something this simple Excel is certainly up to the challenge and I'd venture to say easier to use than Matlab, but then again I have been making charts and pivot tables in Excel for years and only just tried Matlab for the first time yesterday - so I'm not sure about how quickly a complete newbie would take with MS Excel. But lots of command line use in Matlab.
There is a lot of theory about big data and sophisticated techniques, but of course when introducing a new piece of software it's best to try something simple.
So here is what I produced with Matlab.
For something this simple Excel is certainly up to the challenge and I'd venture to say easier to use than Matlab, but then again I have been making charts and pivot tables in Excel for years and only just tried Matlab for the first time yesterday - so I'm not sure about how quickly a complete newbie would take with MS Excel. But lots of command line use in Matlab.