The University of Sydney provides licences to some commercial software packages for staff and students. Please visit the lists of software available to staff and software available to students through the university to see what software you are eligible to access, and for information on how to obtain access to the available packages.
Tools specific to data visualisation that are available at the University are listed and described below. Keep in mind that analysis and visualisation are often overlapping activities, so be sure to check both the analysis and visualisation sections to ensure that you don’t miss the ideal tool for your data!
Adobe Illustrator – A vector graphics editor that can be extremely useful for creating figures or touching up those made in other programs, including adding annotations. Illustrator can also be useful in creating outreach visuals, such as infographics. Illustrator is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud set of tools. Get Illustrator (staff).
Microsoft Visio – A diagramming and vector graphics application that can help you simplify complexity with dynamic, data-driven visuals. Visio shapes can be linked to multiple data sources including Microsoft Excel. Get Visio (staff). (If you're not eligible to request Visio, check out LibreOffice Draw in the freely available tools listed below).
MindManager – A mind mapping tool that helps you create structured, interactive visual maps to facilitate project planning, process analysis, and the consolidation and transfer of knowledge. Get MindManager (staff and students).
In addition to commercial software, a host of open-source and/or freely available tools exist for data visualisation. We have collected a short list of some of the more widely used, or easy to use tools that are available. Keep in mind that analysis and visualisation are often overlapping activities, so be sure to check both the analysis and visualisation sections to ensure that you don’t miss the ideal tool for your data!
Tableau Public – A tool that allows you to create and share interactive charts and graphs, maps, live dashboards and applications. All work will be saved to your Tableau Public profile, visible online.
D3.js – A JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 allows you to create interactive web-based visualisations of your data, and helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.
Highcharts JS – A JavaScript library that allows you to add interactive charts to a website or web application. Free for non-commercial purposes, but requires a license if you wish to use it for a commercial website or project.
Gephi – An interactive visualisation and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.
Palladio – A browser-based tool specifically designed for exploring and displaying historical networks. Data can be displayed using network graphs, maps, timelines, and a gallery.
LibreOffice Draw – Part of the open-source LibreOffice suite, Draw is basically an open-source version of Microsoft Visio (it can even open files created using Visio). Draw is a really useful tool for easily creating diagrams and flowcharts.
Canva – A browser-based graphic design tool with a drag-and-drop infographic creator. Lots of templates to get you started and you can download your finished creation as a jpg, png or pdf.
easel.ly – A website that features free infographic templates and design objects which users can customize to create and share visual ideas. Finished inforgraphics can be exported as jpegs or pdfs. Easy to use with a drag and drop interface, it can lack flexibility, and there are limitations on what it allows you to do.
The Noun Project and Flaticon – Both of these are libraries of free to use icons, which can be really handy when you want to create your own infographics. Make sure to check and comply with any licence conditions that are specified when reusing any content created by someone else.
ParaView – A data analysis and visualisation application allowing users to quickly build visualisations to analyse their data using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The data exploration can be done interactively in 3D or programmatically using ParaView’s batch processing capabilities. ParaView was developed to analyse extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources. It can be run on supercomputers to analyse datasets of petascale size as well as on laptops for smaller data.
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