Section: New Software and Platforms

Bertifier

Participants : Charles Perin, Pierre Dragicevic, Jean-Daniel Fekete.

Figure 2. A spreadsheet formatted and reordered with BERTIFIER: a) the original numerical table; b) the corresponding tabular visualization; c) the final result, reordered, formatted and annotated. The final result is ready to be exported and inserted as a figure.

Bertifier [20] is a web application (available at www.bertifier.com ) for rapidly creating tabular visualizations from spreadsheets. Bertifier draws from Jacques Bertin's matrix analysis method, whose goal was to “simplify without destroying” by encoding cell values visually and grouping similar rows and columns. Although there were several attempts to bring this method to computers, no implementation exists today that is both exhaustive and accessible to a large audience. Bertifier remains faithful to Bertin's method while leveraging the power of today's interactive computers. Tables are formatted and manipulated through crossets [36] , a new interaction technique for rapidly applying operations on rows and columns. Vertifier also introduces visual reordering, a semi-interactive reordering approach that lets users apply and tune automatic reordering algorithms in a WYSIWYG manner. We showed in an evaluation that Bertifier has the potential to bring Bertin's method to a wider audience of both technical and non-technical users, and empower them with data analysis and communication tools that were so far only accessible to a handful of specialists.

More details about the software are available at www.aviz.fr/bertifier