I have a few CSV and XLS files that I would like to analyse or "visualize" online (like in charts etc).
I tried Google Fusion Tables, but I want to know if there are any alternatives.
Also suggest my a few tools I can download that would ease the process instead of using office excel.. (is OpenOffice good enough?)
my typical workflow:
Spotfire and Tableau are amazing commercial applications for this, and Spotfire especially is incredibly easy to use to explore lots of visualizations side-by-side. Both have a desktop version and an online web player (Spotfire demo gallery, Tableau demo gallery). They are both highly scalable, into the millions of rows. Both are expensive, but have free trials.
Edited to remove ManyEyes
You could try using QlikView (BI software)... http://www.qlikview.com/us
There is a free fully functional personal edition you can download from their website.
It is extremely powerful and there is a learning curve involved (not to bad if you only want to do simple things) but plenty of good free tutorials and an active, helpful community forum on their website as well.
It can import data from practically anything and has many built in wizards for doing such things as charts. It's also designed to handle massive recordsets very quickly and indeed it does.
The functionality within it is vast.
You should check out Jolicharts (http://jolicharts.com). It creates data presentations directly connected to your data (Google Docs, Excel sheets, Database, etc.)
You can use sqliteviz which I'm the author of. It is a free open-source offline-first PWA that allows you to convert a CSV file into SQLite database which runs in a browser with sql.js. After that, you can get your data with SELECT * FROM csv_import statement and create various Plotly charts against the result set.
Choose your CSV file. Sqliteviz will show you the Import CSV dialogue with data preview. You can change parsing settings like delimiter character and others.
Now all records from your CSV are available as rows in csv_import table. Get them all with SELECT * FROM csv_import query.
After running a query you can switch the result panel to the chart mode and create a chart with a react-chart-editor component. The same component with some additional features is used in Plotly Chart Studio. Explore its documentation to learn how to build charts with react-chart-editor. You can create various charts from simple line/bar/pie chart to financial candlesticks and scientific visualisation.
See sqliteviz documentation for more details.
Try:
Note: There are some incompatibility issues with files created in MS Excel opened not in MS solutions, but with the first two above you will rarely see it (except for XLSX format - try to save in XLS).
