Templates: Your New Graphing Go-To (Part 6) — How to Customize Your Graph While Increasing Your Efficiency
When you’re visualizing complex data, control over your plot’s design matters. Every color, axis range, and label placement plays a critical role in how clearly your data’s story comes across to stakeholders. But while precision is essential, efficiency is, too. You don’t have a lot of time to create a plot from scratch and then perfect every visual element. The solution? Use templates.
In the fifth installment of our blog series Templates: Your Graphing Go-To, we’re exploring how templates equip you to create the exact plot you’re envisioning while ensuring you maintain a high-level of efficiency.
Save Time and Customize Your Graph Faster
Templates provide a strong, pre-formatted foundation, so you can quickly jumpstart your workflow. In just a few steps, you can download a template and populate it with data, leaving you only one more task to complete in your visualization process: refining your graph to achieve the final output you’re imagining. It’s that simple and efficient—but to put that all in perspective, here’s how templates create room for you to implement all the stylistic choices that matter most to your project, while still empowering you to work quickly.
You Save Time on Setup
With a template, all the essential components—plot type, axes, formatting, legends, and colors—are already in place. Even the data requirements for a template are available so you don’t need to guess. All you have to do is download the template that best suits your project and populate it with your data.
Customization Happens Faster
Once you’ve populated a template with your data, you can make all the customizations you see fit. If you can imagine it, you can graph it. Want to adjust colors, rescale an axis, change the fonts, or apply certain data filters? Done. Because the foundation is already set, you can just focus on refining your graph to achieve the final result you’re envisioning.
Tech Tip: Not all template providers are the same. If you want one that consistently offers templates with polished layouts you can build on and customize to your liking, the Golden Gallery is the platform for you. It has a large, growing collection of ready-to-use templates made for and by geoscientists and engineers. After you open a template in Grapher and populate it with data, you won’t just get a polished graph quickly; you’ll also have full control over its final design.
From Scratch to Streamlined: Templates in Practice
So what does it look like in practice to use templates? Let’s take a real-world scenario that shows just how much templates empower you to control every aspect of your design and maintain a high level of efficiency at the same time.
An environmental engineer needs to create a box plot for a sampling report. In the past, this process required creating the visual from scratch and formatting axes, aligning labels, adjusting color schemes, and more. Today, the environmental engineer just uses a box plot template instead.
With a polished foundation to build on, they get a head start in their workflow, cutting down all the time they would’ve spent starting from scratch. They just have to populate the template with their data and then the only thing left for them to do is make customizations. In less time than ever before, the environmental engineer has the exact visualization they need for their project.
Related Resources
- Templates: Your New Graphing Go-To (Part 1)
- Templates: Your New Graphing Go-To (Part 2)—How They Reduce the Learning Curve
- Templates: Your New Graphing Go-To (Part 3)—How to Ensure Effective Data Visualization With Templates
- Templates: Your New Graphing Go-To (Part 4)—How Templates Make Recreating Your Plots Easier
- Templates: Your New Graphing Go-To (Part 5)—Tired of Being the Designated “Graphing Pro”? Here’s How Templates Help.
Customize Your Graph With Precision & Speed
Designing the graph you need—with all of its specifications—shouldn’t mean sacrificing your time. Templates help enhance efficiency by giving you a pre-formatted layout, so you can quickly kickstart your workflow and jump to one of the best parts of the visualization process: refining your graph so you achieve the output you’re envisioning. So next time you’re designing a plot, consider using a template to enjoy total control over your design while still working efficiently.
