Creating interactive visualizations of your data for web is a cakewalk using silk.co, all you need to do is to import your spreadsheet and start generating your interactive visualizations

You need to sign in to start creating visualizations on silk.co. If you dont have an account, signing up is easy. All you need is a name, an email id and a password, and the account is created immediately

Add your data

Importing data into silk.co is very easy.You can import any spreadsheet by clicking on the ‘Import spreadsheet’ link on the right side of the home screen. There is an option for importing either csv or excel files. You can also choose to import data directly from a google spreadsheets by pasting the URL.

Once you choose a file to import, and then click open, you are taken to a screen where you are shown a number of rows in your data.It is to be noted that each row in the spread sheet is considered to be a page. You can set which column is to be used as a title for each page and how each column should be interpreted. You may also choose to ignore some columns depending upon your requirements.

Once you are done, you can finish importing the data by clicking the ‘Start import’ button on the top right of the page. The time taken to import the data depends upon the number of rows and the type of data you are importing.

Explore Your Collection

Once the data is imported, its shown shown in a dashboard. You can start exploring your data by clicking the ‘Explore your collection’ link, which is just under the collection name

By default, the data is shown as a table. You can change the visualization by clicking the drop down button available on the right side of the explore page.

Apart from a table format, you have the option of visualizing your data as a list, grid, pie chart, bar chart, scatter plot, map and a few other forms.

Generate and save visualizations

Map

Generating visualizations of maps is very easy in silk.co given that it can convert addresses into latitude-longitude pairs and plot them on the map directly. You will understand that it saves a lot of pain, if you have worked on generating map related visualizations previously. But, proper care should be taken to give full address or the plots generated will be erratic.

Get started by choosing the map visualization in the drop down. You can choose the columns you want to show in the pop up for a location in the map; choose the column of the numeric data if you are plotting a heat map; and choose the column on which you want to sort the data from the options given. Most importantly, you have to choose the column which has the location information and the visualization will be generated accordingly. You can choose to add the visualization to your any of your pages.

Given above is a heat map showing home values in the top 200 counties in USA.

Share your work

Once your visualizations are generated, you can choose to email them, share them on social networking platforms like facebook, twitter, linkedin, or embed them in any of your web pages by clicking the ‘Share and embed’ button on the top right corner of the page.

Interactive visualization of the map is given here.