A first tour through Datawrapper

You just signed up to Datawrapper and opened it for the first time. Great! A warm welcome from the whole Datawrapper team. We're happy to have you on board and we hope that Datawrapper will help you to create beautiful charts, maps, and tables. 

This article gives an overview of Datawrapper. In the end, you will have a better sense of where to find settings, help or more information. Let's start!

Dashboard: See your latest visualizations

When you open Datawrapper for the first time, you see the following:

You're on a page we like to call the Dashboard. It shows the most recent visualizations you've created or edited with Datawrapper. Since you haven't done this yet, you'll see a button that says "Create your first chart" instead. 

Right of the dashboard, you will see three panels: 

• Chart views in past 30 days will show how many views your visualizations got in the past 30 days once they are embed.
• Datawrapper River: Our River is a gallery of user charts that you can re-use for your own purposes. The Datawrapper River panel shows you the titles of a mix of our favourite and more recent charts, maps, and tables that you can re-use from the Datawrapper River. Clicking on the titles will bring you directly to the visualizations into the River. 
• Latest improvements: This is our changelog. Here, you can see our latest improvements. To find out more about this, head over to datawrapper.de/changelog.

Menu bar: Access everything important

At the top of each page – including the dashboard – you will see the same five elements: A logo and a menu bar with three options, plus a ☰ menu. Let's walk through them:

• In the top left is the Datawrapper logo. If you're ever lost, you can click it and it will bring you back to the dashboard. Clicking on Dashboard will do the same. 
• Create new... let's you create new charts, maps, or tables. We'll cover this in the next section. 
• Archive will bring you to an overview of all your personal & team charts, maps, and tables, not just the most recent ones like in your dashboard. We'll explain more about it below.

• ☰ will open a little menu with the option to access the Settings, My teams, Language, River, Academy and Logout.When clicking on Language, you can choose another language for the whole Datawrapper app.
  • Academy is what we call our help docs with in-depth how-to's for every visualization type. You're reading an Academy article right now! 
  • We will talk about Settings, My Teams, and River in a bit.

Create new chart/map/table: Follow a 4-step process to a beautiful visualization

If you hover over  Create new... in the menu bar, you see three options: 

• Create new... > Chart brings you to the first step of our chart creation process. That's where you'll first upload your data and then start designing your chart. Available chart types can be found under Step 3: Visualize. You can also see examples for each of them and learn more about them on our website. 
• Create new... > Map brings you to a page that lets you choose if you want to create a choropleth, symbol or locator map. The images and descriptions explain the differences between these three maps. 
• Create new... > Table brings you to the first step of our table creation process (which looks very similar to creating a chart).

No matter which one you'll decide to create first, you will see four big arrows at the top on the page you land on. They differ a little bit depending on if you're creating a chart, table, or a map. For charts, they look like this:These four arrows – of which the current is always in red – lead you through the chart/map/table creation process. To create a visualization, you'll go through each of these steps until you arrive at step 4: Publish & Embed. We won't talk about these four steps here in detail, but you will see them a lot when going through tutorials that explain to you how to create the individual chart or map types. 

Settings: Change your email/password, upgrade, create an API token etc.

When you click  ☰ in the upper right and then on Settings, you will land on a page on where you can change your email and your password, create a team, upgrade to another account or create an API token (we explain what that means in this Academy article):

Archive: See all your visualizations and organize them

When you click on Archive at the top, you will arrive at an overview of all your charts, maps & tables, not just the most recent ones like in your Dashboard. In the archive, you can organize your visualizations in folders. You will be able to see visualizations created by yourself in the Private section. If you're part of a team, you can also see visualizations created by other team members below Shared. 

Learn how to organize your charts with folders in this Academy article.

River: Get inspiration from others and re-use their visualizations

When you click on River in the ☰ main menu, you will get to a gallery filled with charts, maps, and tables by other Datawrapper users. You can click on Reuse below each visualization to reuse their chart for your own articles, presentations or print products. 

Learn more about the River in this Academy article.

And that's it! This concludes our little tour through the Datawrapper app. Simply play around and click on buttons to see what they do (except the "delete your account" button!). If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at support@datawrapper.de. We're happy to help!