New shapes, moving pictures and measuring tools for your charts

A chart used to be a fixed picture: pick a type, draw it, read it. Charts can now take new shapes, move through time, measure what you point at, and keep step with the grid as you zoom in. Labels stay inside their chart instead of colliding, and a map holds its shape with nothing drawn behind it.

Shapes a bar and a line can’t tell

Polar area, radial bar and polar scatter put categories, rings and readings round a circle instead of along an axis. A force-directed tree, packed circles, a Voronoi treemap and a node-link tree or dendrogram each draw a hierarchy from a parent column, a path column or the grid’s own grouping; clicking a branch folds it or selects the rows beneath it. A chord can run in a direction with tapered or arrow-headed ribbons, and a funnel pyramid slices ordered stages out of one triangle. A pictorial chart tells a quantity with a picture, and a spiral timeline winds a long history one turn per day, week or year so a rhythm shows as a streak. A word cloud filters the grid to the rows behind a word you click, and a Venn chart counts the rows in each overlap of two or three sets.

Charts that play, not just sit there

Animation is on by default everywhere: bars grow from the baseline, lines draw across, slices sweep open, and an update glides from the old picture to the new instead of jumping (animation: false turns it off). Two chart types tell a story over time on their own: a bar chart race ranks your top categories at each point and lets them trade places as the figures change, and a motion chart glides one bubble per entity across two measures, trailing where it has been. Both have play, pause, speed and a scrubber, and can share a single clock so they play as one.

Measuring and marking up what you see

Turn on the crosshair and a hairline follows the pointer, snaps to the nearest reading, and lists every series’ value at that point; charts sharing a cursor group read it together, by value rather than by pixel. A measuring tool drags between two points and reads back the change in x, the change in y, the percentage change and the slope, snapping to the nearest data point; it can be pinned so it survives a zoom or a pan. A pen on the chart toolbar draws a smoothed freehand stroke that stays on the readings it was drawn over through a zoom, a pan or a resize, and can be selected, moved, deleted and saved with the chart.

Charts that stay in step with the grid

Zoom and pan work on every chart with axes, by pinch, wheel, drag, the plus and minus keys, the toolbar or a double-click. With viewportFilter set, the grid follows: once a zoom or pan settles, the table and every other chart show exactly the rows in view. A brush or click on a chart now adds its own condition to the grid’s filters instead of replacing them. Click a group in a Voronoi treemap and it redraws as a treemap of just that group’s children, as many levels deep as you like, with a breadcrumb to climb back up. Drag a point, a bar end or a slice edge and the row behind it is edited for real, through the grid’s own validation and undo, with a refused edit springing back and the grid’s own message beside it.

Clearer at a glance

Chart labels no longer collide or get cut off across ten chart types: a marimekko’s column labels keep to their own columns, a calendar’s month and weekday names stop overprinting, a hexbin’s ticks stay clear of its legend, and the outermost tick on a dumbbell, forest or ECDF chart is no longer clipped. A label with no room left shortens with an ellipsis rather than overlap, and the full text stays in the tooltip and the accessible table regardless. The final tick and top label on a line, scatter, candlestick or bar chart’s axis stay inside the chart now, and a dual-axis chart keeps its right-hand title in view. A gauge reads the measure you asked for, its needle clear of the figure at any value, and a fan chart’s forecast no longer runs from zero when the history behind it is empty.

A map that stands on its own, and other finishing touches

A marker or bubble map given no basemap now draws a plain continent outline under its points, fitted to your data, with no key and nothing fetched; switch it off with outline: false if you are drawing your own background. A globe turns the built-in maps into a hemisphere you can spin. Bars, areas, slices, treemap cells and map land all take gradients and hatch, dot or crosshatch patterns, per row or per series, and a line, scatter or marker map point can carry an icon or picture in place of a dot. Every chart works from the keyboard: arrow keys move point by point on a line, area or step chart and read each one out, and a click on a pie, donut, sunburst, treemap tile or chord ribbon selects the rows behind it.

What else changed in the grid is in the changelog.