| Identifying and Using Website Data to Create Graphs
Richard Torian May 27, 2011 I have recently started to use the Google charts tool to graph data that might be of interest to management accountants and other decision makers. I really like visualizing data in charts and graphs when doing so gives me an insight that otherwise I would not obtain as well by looking at the data in tabular format. Graphing data that is freely available on the Internet, especially data provided at government and similar websites, helps to emphasize, I believe, the usefulness of the data that is available at these sites. Hopefully, by such emphasis, more decision makers will better understand the value of these data resources and will use them more frequently. I am now blogging the charts that I am creating using the Google chart tool. You can look at these charts by going to my blog website: http://richardtorian.blogspot.com/. For each chart on the blog, I provide some analysis of what the chart is trying to show and I try to make suggestions on how the graph might be useful to decision makers. Also, importantly, I provide a link (except for a couple of the initial graphs) to the website (or websites), which has the data used to create the chart. Often, the website will have not only the tabular data that was used for the chart but also more data and analysis related to the broader topic that the chart data fits into. Creating a chart and providing a link to the data used in the chart seems like a unique and effective way to focus on data resources on the Internet. Please click here to return to the Management Accounting Information Center front page. Please click here to send an email with comments on this article. |