Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics with LLMs

Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by w-m on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @07:25AM (#37306105)

Last week I helped someone organizing and analyzing their data in Excel. As I'm using Excel only once every couple of years, I had to rewatch the wonderful "You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky" to be productive again. Now seeing this announcement page, I was immediately reminded of the mini-rant towards the end of the video [0]:

> On average, once every three months, there's a startup that makes a thing that they say is going to be amazing, and it's just PivotTables. They're like, "It works with Excel, and it does this amazing consolidation, and slicing and dicing of all your data, and it's amazing, and we're going to make a startup. I'm going to sell this for four hundred ninety-five dollars." And that happens at least once every three months. The trouble is, the VCs usually know about PivotTables.

Of course this product goes a little further, making suggestions what columns to analyze and chart with an LLM. But it's quite funny to me that this Microsoft Research product is reinventing the PivotTable (+PivotChart) part with Python and Pandas.

[0]: https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?si=kkfFHZ_fyGmG3Lnj&t=2988

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Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by Incolotopo on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @07:42AM (#37306257)

To be nitpicking here: Its not reinventing if its new.

And the focus of this research was probably not to invent PivotTables but the Interface for these through LLMs

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Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by jgalt212 on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @08:08AM (#37306495)

> Interface for these through LLMs

no code pivot tables?

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Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by smcleod on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @09:15AM (#37307389)

Pivollama

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Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by beebmam on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @10:52AM (#37308810)

It's impossible to use excel for big data, the application has soft limits due to responsiveness.

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Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by dylan604 on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @01:54PM (#37311465)

But nobody today is going to read let alone promote a blog about pivot tables. Sprinkle in LLM references, and the fad wave riders will sing its praises

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Re:Automatic Generation of Visualizations and Infographics w... by bugglebeetle on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @03:52PM (#37312989)

Even Microsoft has to know Excel is shit software for large datasets. I can’t even get it to do a VLOOKUP correct half the time.

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