Here’s something handy for people who hate Excel. Venngage, the company that lets you make infographics with the click of (a few) buttons, recently launched a new product called Beam. Beam does for charts what Venngage does for infographics as a whole. Which is to say, it makes the process of transforming data into useful visuals very, very easy.
Beam is built on a template. Swap out the default text and data for your own, and you’ve got the bones of a chart. The web tool comes with four chart options—pie, bar, column, and line—and a handful of formatting choices. If we're being real, the variety isn’t Earth-shatteringly cool. It would be a lot more fun if you could choose your own color scheme as opposed to Beam’s pre-packaged swatches, for example. But what the tool lacks in choice it makes up for in efficiency. Beam holds your hand through the entire process. Embedding the chart is a matter of copy and pasting a link, and Beam makes it super easy to share on social media.
It’s clear that Beam is trying to be the go-to chart design tool for the Instagram set (the company said so itself!). And fair enough—the tool, for better or worse, does democratize the process of making clean, accurate graphics. I’m not sure how many teens are going to be uploading pie charts to their profiles, but who knows. The internet's seen weirder things.
