Google seems to be rolling out improvements to Google Spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow. Or like there's no Microsoft Office tomorrow anyway. When you click the little chart icon in the Google Spreadsheets toolbar, you now get a whole slew of charts and other gadgets to choose from in addition to the pie, bar, and line charts that Google introduced a while back.

The new gadget gallery includes:

• Tables and pivot tables
• Maps and heatmaps
• Google web and image searches for selected values
• Organization charts

Users can also create their own custom gadgets using the Google Gadgets API. In non-chart/gadget news, Google has also added the option to receive email notifications when someone changes a spreadsheet, and a variety of other bug fixes and feature enhancements including improved sort, filter, and unique functions.

[via Google Operating System]

While you're busy waiting for Google to add a Power Point clone to its Docs & Spreadsheets suite, Google went and added support for charts to its online spreadsheet application.

The chart function is easy to use. Just highlight the cells you want to analyze and click the little pie-chart button in the toolbar. You can make charts with columns, bars, lines, pie, or scatter methods. You can also export the chart as a PNG image.

The feature works well with Firefox and Internet Explorer, but Opera is not officially supported so Opera users may experience some quirks.

[via Google Operating System]

Swivel is a data, number crunching, graph oriented, chart mecca for those who are so inclined. The site was launched in December 2006 as the brainchild of two physics majors. Swivel has now reached an important milestone with its one millionth graph. Swivel was designed for users to share data so you can upload your own and have others explore your findings.
If you are curious about say - Verizon's upload speeds compared to T-Mobile, or whether you are in the top 1% income bracket ($238,000 annually), or what the most educated cities are, then you will find a lot to love about Swivel. Another cool thing is you can compare all different kinds of data in a single graph and find correlations. I can see all kinds of arguments I lost in the past that would have been so much more in my favor, if only I had that readily accessible chart or graph or something. Now that data is well within reach - it's tagged, easily search-able, and I can have my data within a click or two.

Oh, how I love free things. Especially free pretty things. And I'm the kind of person who things Flash charts and graphs are pretty, so I present amCharts and PHP/SWF Charts. amCharts is a relative newcomer that creates attractive Flash pie and donut charts based on data you put in a text file in either XML or CSV formats (which makes exporting from Excel easy). It's very configurable, allowing you to specify colors, border, tilt (for a 3D effect), labels, fonts, backgrounds, and so on. amCharts' creators promise bar, column, and line charts this spring.

PHP/SWF Charts is sort of amCharts' big brother. It's been around awhile longer and features more than a dozen different chart types and nearly unlimited configurability. As the name implies, PHP/SWF Charts uses PHP to load data from dynamic sources, but it's not required--there's XML/SWF Charts that will load data from a regular XML file. With its advanced features comes more complexity, of course, and the learning curve is probably greater, but if you need, say, a stacked 3D column chart, it's the way to go.

As I mentioned, both charting tools are free, but not totally free. The free version of amCharts will put a small link to amCharts.com in the corner of your charts, and PHP/SWF Charts will direct users to its web site if they click on it. For a single-site license amCharts will cost you 45 Euros (about US$60) and PHP/SWF charts will cost you US$45. "Enterprise" licenses for unlimited sites cost 245 Euros (~US$322) or $550 respectively.

In an effort to stay hot on Yahoo!'s tail, Google has updated Google Finance. It's only been six months in the running, and now its time for a change. In this update, Google has added data and charts for up to 40 years of US stocks. A new homepage design lets users see currency and sector information instantly, as well as a listing of top movers. Registered users on the site have the ability to build portfolios and track stocks and companies. Users can also upload information from other online portfolios into their Google Finance portfolio. The new beta design launched on Tuesday. Don't forget to also add your Google Finance portfolio to your start page.

So what do you think? Is it a Yahoo! Finance killer yet?

Blogger and web designer Vitaly Friedman has put together a very handy list of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts. He identifies about 20 resources spanning free software, commercial software, web-based tools, and tutorials that will help you make pretty graphs, charts, and diagrams. Of course, I'm most interested in the free stuff, but if you use Illustrator or Excel, or are looking for something a little more robust, the tutorials and commercial tools could prove invaluable.

Microsoft Excel's charts are powerful, but boy are they a pain to use, especially if you just want quick, simple bars alongside your data. Well, no more: The blog at Juice Analytics has some very cool tips for making instant bar charts from your data. All it takes is the REPT() function, which will repeat any bit of text as many times as you want, and the | symbol. It certainly doesn't sound earth-shattering, but the results are impressive. The blog post goes on to show how you can use conditional formatting to color-code the bars according the value, and in a follow-up post there's even more impressive trickery. If you find yourself using Excel a lot, don't miss these tips.

[Via Lifehacker]

Earlier this week Yahoo! announced changes that would roll out soon to upgrade aspects of the Yahoo! Finance property. One of these changes, and probably the most significant for daily users, is the completely overhauled Stock Charts.

When Google rolled out Google Finance property, most of the hubbub around their offering was the dynamic charts. These hadn't been seen before anywhere and had a lot of "kewl" factor in them. Even without the kewl charts, Yahoo! continued to be the most comprehensive and most visited financial resource on the web. And now, Y! is rolling out their version of dynamic stock charts with lots of "kewl" factor. Read on for an overview of the new features and my thoughts.

Yahoo! announced in a press release that many long-awaited upgrades were soon to appear on Yahoo! Finance, albeit some only in beta form.

Stock Charts - Google showed us that they could beat Yahoo! to the punch with their Ajaxy charting tools. Unfortunately for Google, the financial users are a pragmatic bunch and need more than the "kewl" factor to make them switch as indicated by Yahoo! continuing to hold the financial users' interest. According to this recent announcement, Y! Finance users will soon be enjoying new kewl dynamic charting tools which take advantage of Flash and DHTML . It pays to be patient, eh?

Message boards - Yahoo! has been upgrading its message boards throughout its many sites for many months now. Yahoo! Finance has seen some of these changes already. Easier search, threaded views and now a rating system to quickly locate quality contributors to the conversation.

Y! Finance Badge - Y! Finance badges for your website have been out in beta for a while now but according to this announcement are out of beta and available for general consumption.

Y! Finance Videos - Y! has made huge advances recently in its ability to serve video regardless of where it is hosted. This is spreading to various Y! sites including Y! Finance. Today's announcement points out that video from several news sources are being made available via the Y! Finance site.

The new stock charts are being evasive. Hopefully we will see them in action soon even if only on a beta version of the Y! Finance site.

UPDATE: The new chart tools are being rolled out to small percentage of users for now. This is much as the ! home page revision was revealed to only a few users for their feedback before opening it up to all Y! home page visitors. More Y! Finance users can expect to see the new chart tools as time goes by.

After last month's rumors, Google took nobody by surprise today with the launch of Google Finance. The new financial portal is pretty slick, with a similar feel to Google Maps. Stock charts are powered by Flash rather than AJAX and have a very flexible interface. Along with all the usual info like market cap, volume, and so on, Google Finance also annotates its charts with recent news articles and even blog and newsgroup chatter. One feature I found cute is the "Management" are of the page that lists the company's higher ups—if you hover your mouse over one of their names, a little headshot of them will pop up. Ironically, when I hit the page for Apple (AAPL), it showed no photo for Steve Jobs, possibly the most-photographed CEO in the valley.

Alexaholic "blends Alexa traffic charts with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core Alexa traffic junkies." What's that mean? It means you can check out Alexa traffic charts with a lot less clutter and a much more responsive interface than you get at Alexa.com. It also has a JavaScript snippet that you can add to your web site to show live charts for any web site(s). Wicked cool.

[Via TechCrunch]