Google Charts API

Introduction

There is a whole industry devoted to data visualization and many books written about it and for good reasons. I would not have thought not many people can do it from a spreadsheet but data presented as a graph, chart or pictogram makes it easier to analyze, to spot trends and patterns.

There are hundreds of website data visualization tools around. I happen to like the Google Charts API, sometimes known as the Google Visualization API, and these pages were written to answer some common questions about using the API and to give solutions to problems I have encountered when using it.

The API and Support

The API can be found at https://developers.google.com/chart. The documentation is usually very good with plenty of examples.

The API has its own user-supported forum or group at https://groups.google.com/g/google-visualization-api. A general Google query including "Google Chart" or "Google Visualization" (including the quotes) will generally bring up several results usually from Stack Overflow.

Pros

Lots of documentation
Easy to produce charts from the examples
Charts are interactive
Charts are customizable using CSS
Free (but not open source)
Data can come from a variety of sources
Cross browser compatible
Has dedicated help forum

Cons

The libraries cannot be run from your server, they must be run from Google's
Some documentation is not very clear
Some knowledge of JavaScript is needed
Can be tricky exporting the charts as an image, especially vector types
Cannot test the charts, at least the ones created from Google Sheets, on a web page locally, they must be on a web server or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) errors will be generated.

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