Sankey diagrams are an important visualisation tool but drawing them is a tedious job. There are a number of both freeware and payware tools out there that do the drawing for you but I found none of them convincing or worth paying for. I want a tool that
- is not too difficult to use
- saves you a lot of time
- gives you full control of the output in form of a vector graphic
- allows you to draw flows in all directions, including circular shapes
- has a text or xls interface
- is free
- comes under and open source license
Over the last two years, IEF’s programming student Mahadi Hasan has developed the CircularSankey web application, and today, we officially launch the first version of it. The Circular Sankey web app is not a tool for making perfect Sankeys but a tool to create raw Sankey graphics that, with some extra editing in a vector graphics software like Inkscape, can be quickly turned into presentable output. It is based on the D3.js graphics library. The development goal is an app that saves about 90% of the time of creating a presentable Sankey.
The Sankey app is hosted on our virtual machine.
There are two Youtube videos that give a tour through the app and explain the interface to Excel.
We hope that you will find this app a useful tool and are looking forward to receiving your comments, lots of nice Sankey examples, and suggestions for improvement under in4mation@indecol.uni-freiburg.de.
(Cover image credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_(Instrument)#/media/File:French_horn_front.png)
#/media/File:French_horn_front.png){kind=link}