This is a test graph using Many Eyes, a social visualization site. Many Eyes lets you upload data and play with different ways of showing it via graphs, charts, maps, and eye-popping crazy variants of these. You can share them and discuss others' work on the site. It's free. The researchers at IBM, who run this Web site, tell me they have no plans to add advertising to the site. They do, however, use the site for their own research.
Below is a bar graph of high school graduation and dropout rates for all Virginia school districts. This uses data from the Virginia Dept. of Education web site, which has all sorts of stuff on it, organized pretty cleanly. I just pulled out the graduation and dropout rates.
I may use this on timesdispatch.com if I can get the right results. As far as I can tell Many Eyes works best on data sets with only two columns. It doesn't work so great if you have multiple variables or (what would be on excel) a pivot table. By that I mean it doesn't let you drill down through multiple sets of linked data very easily. Still, there are tons of possibilities for this, and you can't beat free.
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