One of my favourite TED video’s is by Hans Rosling. He makes statistics interesting and his presentation style is superb. His full set of TED video’s can be found here but of more interest is GapMinder.
Gapminder is a non-profit organisation founded by Rosling and his daughter which developed the software used in his video’s, software which was bought by Google in 2007. The software is flash based and can be ran on the website to compare a wide array of data from 1960 to 2006. It’s fascinating and eye opening when you start to play with the data available and also look at examples that other people have done.
The Gapminder website has an informative blog and also a large number of video’s highlighting talks form Rosling and the facts behind the data that can be uncovered.
You can also make use of the Gapminder software on your own Google document. Follow this guide to setup the data and then insert a Motion Chart gadget to visualise your data. If you don’t find the software useful I urge you to at least try the video’s as you won’t fail to find them interesting.