Grapher

What do you like best?

The program is small yet powerful. It could load and visualize pretty large datasets with ease. It's rock-solid, I don't remember any crashes, even when working with large datasets. I've found that the user interface is very intuitive. It's much easier to learn how to use Grapher than other common data visualization tools such as Excel, Tableau, or Mathplotlib. You don't need any programming skills to create great graphs. The selection of graph types is amazing. For instance, it could create vector plots, where you have to connect different points with a line. I've never encountered this option in another plotting software. It's much more intuitive to add subplots to the existing graphs or manipulate data limits than you can do in Excel. You don't have to know to write code, working with Grapher. There's good support for the different data formats as well.

What do you dislike?

Despite that the application is mature and feature-rich, I can't find some of the features, commonly found in other popular software packages. For instance the currently, there is no way to duplicate a whole sheet with all the objects on it, as you do in Excel. To do that you have to create a blank page and use copy-paste. Also, there's no way to rearrange the order of the pages. There's no way how to close redundant pages in the Worksheet manager. Price is a bit high for most of the organizations.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I mostly use Grapher to create data visualizations for scientific articles. Currently, I use Grapher to visualize data on the COVID pandemic, such as numbers of daily cases, deaths, incidence rates, numbers of COVID-19 related Tweets on Twitter.