id[e]as » google http://www.eprugh.com/blog brainstorming ablog. Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:06:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Google Charts: not used enough http://www.eprugh.com/blog/2008/11/06/google-charts-not-used-enough/ http://www.eprugh.com/blog/2008/11/06/google-charts-not-used-enough/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:44:56 +0000 ep http://www.eprugh.com/blog/?p=18 I believe firmly in the use of top-tier level platforms for the things you want to accomplish. Not necessarily for brand recognition, but because of a superior product that’s offered as part of a larger goal of accomplishing everything you need to do. Specifically, I relate to interactive marketing tools.

Google offers an incredible API for use with their Charts capabilities. You have the ability to pass numbers to a URL and define that URL for the source of an image. That image will render a graph or chart that you specify.

That means any time, any where, through any medium, you have the ability to better prove your point through charts. By the way, this really requires no development work. The only things you need to know are…

  1. chart size (width x height)
  2. the data points
  3. chart type
  4. chart text

That’s it. From there, you can either direct your browser to the URL that you need to build—and go to File > Save As… to save the image—or you can insert the chart in a Web page using an HTML “img” tag.

The URL would look something like…

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=250x100
&chd=t:60,40
&cht=p3
&chl=Hello|World

And will render like this…

And that’s amazing. This stuff should be on every website. Seriously.

So get out there and go check out how you can start using Google Charts.

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