by Some of our favorite iPhone apps are the ones we don’t use every day. For every Twitter client and text editor, there’s a photo enhancer or layout tool that we turn to only when we want a specific need filled quickly and easily. While we can’t specifically imagine an instance when we’ll need to use it, Viz has definitely earned a spot on that list.
Even if it wasn’t the only automatic chart-maker in the App Store, we’re pretty sure that Viz would be the best. With a unique interface that churns out professional-looking graphs without the need to mess with spreadsheets or percentages, Viz does one thing very well — so well that we’ve already started looking for excuses to use it.
There’s not much of a learning curve with Viz. Launching the app brings you directly to a menu where you can start a new chart or access one from your library, while heading into the creation tool brings up a clear set of options: five charts with five sets of colors. You can choose pie, bar, cloud, skyscraper, or parliament for the style of graph, and input up to six color-coded numbers to plot. Charts are instantly created and can be easily edited and turned into jpegs for sharing.
The finished product is gorgeous, with bright graphics and bold fonts that cleanly showcase your data, but this utterly simplistic method isn’t without limitations. For one, there aren’t a whole lot of customization options. You’re confined to the preset color combinations that Viz has chosen and limited to six criteria per graph, so you might need to pare down your data. Also, there’s no way to change the color of an entry or rearrange the order without deleting it, and the cloud chart refused to show more than three plots.
The bottom line. If you need to make a chart in a jiffy, Viz will do the trick.
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