A collection of Datawrapper pro tips

In our Academy section " Datawrapper Pro Tips", you will find lots of ideas that hopefully help you to use Datawrapper more efficiently. We intend this list for people who've already build lots of visualizations with Datawrapper, or for people who just start out with our tool but bring experience with our tools. 

🎈 Connect to Google Sheets

If you work in Google Sheet, connect it with Datawrapper in step 1. Now when you change the data in your Google Sheet, you just need to reload Datawrapper to see it. No need to go back to step 1 and paste the new data there. Especially if you're still in trial and error mode, this saves a lot of time. Learn how to link to a Google Sheet in this Academy article.

🎈 Use Datawrapper from within R / Python

If you work in R or Python, consider using our API with the R library or Python library to directly create charts out of your data analysis workflow. You will also be able to change title, description and notes in charts with live-updating data: 

🎈 HTML is your friend

Annotations, tooltips, titles, descriptions, notes, even map color key titles – all of them accept at least a <br> line break, if not an <img> or a <b style="">. Here are four Academy articles explaining how to use HTML:

🎈 Some chart types "hide" other ones

Since our charts come with quite some options, you can create some chart types our of other ones. For example, you can create a slope chart out of a line chart, or a population pyramid out of split bars. Especially scatterplots are very flexible – users of us have created vertical dot plots, stacked dot charts, line charts and timelines with it. Find more examples of Datawrapper scatterplots here. 

🎈 Use the annotation "offset" option

When creating annotations, the offset feature is a bid hidden and might seem a bit hard to understand, but you'll find that it's necessary to make sure that your charts look best on all devices; desktop and mobile. This way, you can also create beautiful, responsive axis labels. We explain how to use offset well in this Academy article.

🎈 Change your data to be more flexible with colors and highlights

If you understand well in which format the Datawrapper app needs your data and how it translates it into your charts, you can use that to your advantage. For example, if you have one line in a line chart over 5 years but want to dash the last two years of it to show that it's a prediction, put the first three years and the last two years in two different columns to be able to style them differently. Here's an example of the multiple-column-trick (click on "Edit this chart" in the top right to see how it's done): 

You think that a pro tip is missing? Let us know at support@datawrapper.de