The current plotting tool has a very rigid input format: The input comes from a single table, with the x-axis in one column, and each y series coming from a different column. This is great for things like grouped bar plots or some types of line charts, but difficult for other types of data, generally requiring a pre-processing step. A few examples of challenges:
Scatter plots can't differentiate points based on a grouping attribute... all y coordinates need to be grouped on the corresponding x coordinate.
Data comes from a single table. It's not possible to put multiple datasets on the same chart.
The UI is very focused on line/grouped-bar plots.
In short, it would be useful to have different UIs (whether via different cell types, or possibly a tabbed UI in the plot cell frontend) for different types of charts. Types of charts I find myself regularly coming up with preprocessing hacks for:
[x] Box/Whisker Plots
[x] CDF Plots
[x] Aggregate Bar Charts (Sum, Count, Avg, Min, Max, etc...) (possibly a subclass of box/whisker)
The current plotting tool has a very rigid input format: The input comes from a single table, with the x-axis in one column, and each y series coming from a different column. This is great for things like grouped bar plots or some types of line charts, but difficult for other types of data, generally requiring a pre-processing step. A few examples of challenges:
In short, it would be useful to have different UIs (whether via different cell types, or possibly a tabbed UI in the plot cell frontend) for different types of charts. Types of charts I find myself regularly coming up with preprocessing hacks for: