Web publishing startup Medium has unveiled a handy new data visualization tool called Charted that allows anyone to make beautiful charts in seconds.

Medium says Charted was initially built by its Product Science team as a means of analyzing data and communicating their findings with the rest of the team. To create a data visualization, all you need to do is feed it a spreadsheet or CSV file and Charted will work its magic.

Medium says it’s focused on “a few core principles” to retain user trust. As such, it doesn’t store any data – it simply ‘looks’ at it, creates a visualization, and then it’s done. It doesn’t transform or manipulate any data either, displaying exactly what is fed to it. Finally, Medium says Charted is not a formatting tool and has very few customization features, a deliberate choice made to ensure ease of use.

Charted only works with publicly available files on a server such as Dropbox or Google Docs; there’s no way to upload spreadsheets stored on a hard drive. Generated charts are updated regularly, so if the data changes, so does the visualization.

Here’s a quick example of how it looks:

There’s no way to embed charts, but since is Medium has made Charted open-source, anyone who wants to can flesh it out with more features later on.

photo credit: marcinignac via photopin cc