I first thought I might write about my new iMac and falling in love with the OS, but instead I’m going to write a bit about a new mashup tool that a colleague introduced me to today. It’s called Widgenie, and it takes Excel or CSV files and makes nifty graphs and charts out of the data.
I’ve done this several times using Excel, and often I find that there are too many things to tweak to do just a quick and dirty graph or chart for a meeting/presentation. With Widgenie, I found the opposite to be true. Cell formats are limited to text, number, and date/time, and for the life of me, I could not get it to show data for resources over a period of time (i.e. one year of use stats for a collection of databases).
That being said, the tool is in Beta, so it’s possible that greater functionality will come. For now, though, it’s probably useful for only simple graphs and charts, such as this:
awesome chart! the same should be used for “gonna rain”/”not gonna rain”
Thanks, Todd! It was inspired by GraphJam. In fact, I submitted one with this idea, and hopefully they’ll post it one of these days.
Interesting use of a chart. I sorta copied it here:
http://app.widgenie.com/WidgetView.aspx?ID=7b5f834b_a5de_45f9_b3b3_ab3de27e857f
But Widgenie is way cooler than that. You can make anything from simple bar graphs to text clouds, and they look great and are really neat. You can track it and stuff too. It’s a lot better than you make it sound.
wow… you don’t like widgenie, and you love macs? that can only mean one thing: you’re gay.
Wow, Real Man, you sure are perceptive! Actually, I didn’t say that I don’t like Widgenie, just that it’s not as versatile as I need it to be.
Before I posted this blog entry, I wondered how long it would take before some tool from the company would show up here. Looks like my guess wasn’t far from the mark.