Chart Tool is a platform for creating beautiful charts in under a minute. Designed to fit the needs of a fast-paced mobile and print newsroom, Chart Tool generates responsive interactive charts for the web, JPGs and PNGs for social media and PDFs for print.

The first version of Chart Tool launched in The Globe and Mail’s newsroom in spring 2015. In under a year, reporters and editors have created more than 2000 charts using the tool.

The philosophy behind it was simple: it should be easy for anyone in the newsroom to create a great chart that just works — for every platform.

Chart Tool is made up of two parts:

A back-end interface for storing data, creating and exporting charts, and generating a static embed code, powered by Meteor. The embed codes are static by design — if your back end goes down, all the charts on your site will still display properly. Try out a demo of the charts interface.

A front-end JavaScript and CSS library that parses embed codes generated by the back-end and renders a responsive chart on your website using D3.js. The front-end library also offers an API that can be accessed to modify charts before or after they’ve been drawn.