Aladdin Excel Chart Builder

From Spreadsheets to Shareable Charts

Many analyses stall at the last step: the numbers are aggregated, but the conclusion still sits in cells. Copying values into another chart tool often breaks series names, colors, and labels. excel-chart-builder turns local .xlsx / .xls data into chart assets that can be dropped into weekly reports, decks, or web dashboards.

How It Works and Where It Fits

The build_chart.py script reads the workbook, assumes the first row is the header, uses the first column as X, and plots the remaining numeric columns as Y. It supports bar, line, area, pie, doughnut, scatter, hbar, stacked_bar, radar, polarArea, bubble, and combo, and can apply --pivot for grouped, crossed, or multi-column aggregation before charting. In practice, use line for trends, pie or doughnut for shares, hbar for long category names, and combo for magnitude plus ratio. Output can be interactive HTML with hover values, PNG download, and legend toggling, or static PNG for embedding in Word, PowerPoint, and email.

It also ships with cn-stock and vibrant palettes: the former follows the red-up, green-down convention common in Chinese financial reading, while the latter is better suited to presentations and dashboards. The tool only reads local Excel files, leaves the source untouched, and does not handle image/PDF table extraction, database fetching, GIS heatmaps, or real-time large-screen rendering. If the task is formula editing, data cleaning, or flow diagrams, use spreadsheet or diagram tooling instead.