If you've ever worked in any data analysis, you've probably considered using ChatGPT to help you display your data. This is where using ChatGPT to make charts and tables comes into play. It's a fantastic tool that can really help with data visualization, but there are some caveats and limitations to just how much it can do.
If you want to make charts, you'll need to purchase ChatGPT Plus. It'll set you back $20 a month, and that's because ChatGPT has built-in code execution and image generators that are available only to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Tables can be made in free ChatGPT, though. There are also plugins you can use in ChatGPT Plus that will help you visualize data if you don't want to use the default methods.
How to use ChatGPT to make charts and tables
Step 1: Decide what you want to make a table of
If you're using the free version of ChatGPT and want the tool to make a table of publicly available information, be aware that the data is only trained through September 2021. Therefore, you may need to make some corrections if you're trying to generate a table using current data or trends.
That aside, all you need to do is tell ChatGPT that you want a table, and it'll do this without any questions asked. Think of practically anything you want, and it'll do it. For this exercise, I asked ChatGPT to generate a table of iconic and popular albums.
Step 2: Make any changes that you need
If you want any changes made, you can ask ChatGPT to make modifications to the table. I asked ChatGPT to add the most popular song from each album to the table, and it was able to do so without any problems.
Step 3: Visualizing the data
From here, we'll need to switch over to ChatGPT Plus to visualize the data in the tool. We can pose the same question to ChatGPT and ask it to make a bar chart, and it will happily comply.
Always double-check the data that it's using, though, to make sure it's accurate. Simply prompting the tool to "make a vertical bar chart of the data" will suffice.
Step 4: Supply your own data
If you want to supply your own data, you absolutely can.
- Upload your own CSV file to ChatGPT by clicking the paper clip button to the left of the prompt input.
- Ask it to visualize the data. I used data collected during my Steam Deck review.
- Tell it exactly what you want. I asked it to draw the gpu_temp column.
If you're familiar with Python, it'll also provide the Python code that it uses to generate the graphs.
Step 5: Manipulate, analyze, and export the data
You can ask ChatGPT to do lots of things with datasets. For example, I submitted a dataset with U.S. Census Bureau information from 2000 to 2019, and I was able to query the data included in the dataset through multiple prompts.
I requested:
- A bar chart
- A line graph
- A change-over-time graph
- A pie chart
In terms of data manipulation, for example, you could ask it to merge groups. I asked ChatGPT to merge the population groups of ages 0-4 and 5-17, and it was able to do so, supplying an updated pie chart with those groups merged.
Getting ChatGPT to graph it
By simply asking the tool to export the graphs, ChatGPT exports these graphs in high resolution. All of the above graphs were created when I prompted ChatGPT to export the graphs I asked it to make while analyzing the data.
While making tables is fairly rudimentary, visual graphs like these are far superior to the simplistic tables made by ChatGPT 3.5. If you use a laptop for programming and data analysis, chances are this will be a good bit faster, too.