Charts can now be copied and downloaded

I had an email a few weeks ago asking why the charts on the site could not be copied or downloaded. The simple answer is that that in order to have interactivity on the charts as the mouse hovers over them and to keep loads relatively low on the server the charts are generated in your browser by javascript. All of the actual work is done by the really easy to use Google Charts library. Because of the way that this is done - it never really exists as a "picture" - it seemed downloading would be impossible. This is a pity because they can be handy to use in documents and presentations. If you have seen any presentations that I have done I use screenshots of the site and these can be a bit of a faff to produce.

On looking a little further I was pleasantly surprised to see that those nice folk at Google had made a print and copy option for the charts. This only happened at the end of January and the site is currently on an even newer (and possibly less stable version) as there was a small bug which Google quickly squashed.

So if you want to download or print a chart just click on the link underneath to get a fully usable print or embeddable png. I would be grateful if you could mention the source when you use this in presentations or documents but otherwise there are no conditions on what you do with them.

2 comments:

Adrian Midgley said...

Clever stuff.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.