I suggest making the landing page a bit more clear... I sat there looking at the single sentence thinking, "What?" It's not so much a missing link between anything, as it is a way to create visualizations from your spreadsheet data, if you feel comfortable enough to paste it on a random website.
"Create visualizations from your spreadsheet data"
That's what this does. The "missing link" cliché didn't score any points with me, but the product looks extremely cool.
One other point of feedback, I clicked the "How it works" link, and when the page scrolled down, the animation was already on step 4, but that text is small, so I didn't realize I was watching the last step. I was a bit confused.
Maybe consider using a scroll position detection library to hold the animation until the user has it in view, or use something more clear to indicate which step is being illustrated:
For me the missing link would be a clean way of getting Excel data into a format that could be read by my D3 scripts without needing custom macros, exporting to Excel's flaky CSV format and a manual reload at the end.
One good reason would be (as he says) that it is flaky. eg how does it handle newlines, commas, tabs and non-ascii characters in data? I've had to pull dirty data between systems before, and csv as the lowest common denominator tends to be lossy as there's no spec on this stuff. Some systems (eg oracle's csv import) do support forms of escaping, but they're not interoperable.
I mean that I want to use Excel as a spreadsheet and use its contents to drive a D3 diagram without the current hassle of getting the data out of Excel into a format that D3 can read cleanly (and continuously - if I update the spreadsheet, the diagram should also update).
My startup's in a similar space: http://getbulb.com (beta is invite only for the next couple of weeks, but if you're curious and want a go, fire an email asking to info@getbulb.com, free to use currently)
I adore Density Design's work, and some of it was inspiration for what I'm doing now, so seeing this kind of thing is both validating & scary!
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1048576) (tried to allocate 12288 bytes) in /var/www/raw.densitydesign.org/public/wp-includes/option.php on line 553
All the more reason to just clone it and try it out ;-) It's pretty awesome, actually. Clone it then just npm install -g bower && (make sure bowser is in your path) && npm install && npm start
To be a little nitpicky: why did you start with obscure high-dimensional visualizations such as alluvial plots, dendrograms, sphere packings? I believe there is much value in the classics: bar charts, histograms, scatter plots; one should only move to more complex visualizations if there is absolutely no way to use a simple one.
This is fantastic!
I simply created 3 graphs based on email client data featuring a dendogram, circular dendogram, and circular packing. It charts the relationship of OS, device type, email client type, and client name. http://minus.com/m5VsIg2QvP2R3
How did you make that really cool animation on the homepage? I have been attempting to do this myself with javascript setTimeout mixed with css3 animation but its freakin awful, because it's one just massive callback inside a callback. it must be indented like 60 times near the end of my animation.
Nice. But the biggest problem of spreadsheets is sharing and organizing data between multiple users, think github for spreadsheets. These visualizations are very good, but they are not a "hair on fire" kind of problem for most of the spreadsheets users.
Nice project, but the name is terrible IMO, in terms of being overly generic and possibly ungooglable - it's painful enough to sort out crap when looking for RAW image troubleshooting.
