Overall Satisfaction with Google Charts
We are using it for an internal dashboard product. We display sales, inventory, profit & loss labor management data using various charts and tables. Development is very rapid, and virtually no training is necessary for our dashboard - these are the problems that were solved.
- Very quick to develop charts and graphs. Jquery, javascript, AJAX all of it works.
- Sortable tables, again, very easy to develop
- Can handle a ton of data - I've brought in every item for at an entire store sorted by department and section into a tree map - works great.
- It's impossible to freeze a column in a table. You can freeze the header titles, but not the leftmost column. If you have a very wide table, this is a problem.
- You cannot put NA in a cell if it's a number - this is a big problem that I had to solve with CSS by making a certain range of numbers have the same cell background and font so that it would appear blank. This is not a great solution, but it's more accurate than a zero
- Cells cannot be sized as small as I would like - the minimum is something like 26px wide and 20px tall. I can't imagine why this is.
- GD,GIFGraph,ImageMajik
The basic configuration will take you a very long way. Rolling your own charts with GD and GIFGraph is very very cumbersome.