Tired of creating charts in Microsoft Excel and transporting them to images for your web pages? Tsk, Tsk. Grow up and make the creation of charts too dynamic. We boast of getting everything dynamically but then why this preparing else where and transferring some where else? Want to try something different and innovative. Then get along the bandwagon and learn a bit of how to create charts using the Google Chart API. Here is a small example code:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World
Click me to see how this link works in action. Well, this is a very basic example to be given if you are going to have a first look at it this way. Lets move on to something complex and lets drive in between the different flavors over which you can create amazing charts, maps and yeah, even venn diagrams. Now, you might have seen how the link looks like. Let the people who do not have time to even click that have a look at how the chart looks like.
Ok, very basic chart. If you observe the link that we have provided above,
1. You can observe 'chd=t:60,40' which are nothing but how much ‘Hello’ and ‘World’ should occupy in the chart. Simple. Wait.
2. Now, check the ‘cht=p3′ which is nothing but the type of the chart.
3. Now, ‘chs=250×100′, yes, you are right. It depicts the size of the image to be generated. This is what Google provides regarding the constraints over the sizes:
Specify chart size with
chs=<width in pixels>x<height in pixels>For example,
chs=300x200generates a chart 300 pixels wide and 200 pixels high.The largest possible area for all charts except maps is 300,000 pixels. As the maximum height or width is 1000 pixels, examples of maximum sizes are 1000×300, 300×1000, 600×500, 500×600, 800×375, and 375×800.
For maps, the maximum size is 440 pixels wide by 220 pixels high.
4. chl=Hello|World is the chart’s label. You can change it to what ever you wish to. Like ‘Pizza|Burger’, ‘Obama|Bush’, creativity rules.
So, what are the different chart types provided??
There are loads and loads of tricks that can be done and to create those complex kind of Charts to woo your clients. Just go to College@Home and select what you wish to do.
All the 50 great tricks provided are explained in detail and it is nothing but a piece of cake to learn and use the Google Charts API.
You can even have a look at the tutorials being given out by Google.
