Make an animated chart video from CSV

How to make a video from a CSV file

1. Open, drop or paste a CSV file, or keep the file you opened in another ViewCSV tool. The example is a synthetic quarterly revenue table.
2. Under Data, choose the table layout. Long tables have a time, an entity and a value column; wide tables have one column per series.
3. Under Story, choose the animation and the look, and add a headline, a source line, a unit and optionally a logo or background image.
4. Under Video, choose the format (16:9, 1:1 or 9:16), resolution, length and frame rate, and the first and last period.
5. Scrub the timeline or step period by period to check the frames, then choose a download format and press Create video.

The ten animations

Preparing the timeline: periods, duplicates and missing values

• Period order. Automatic order checks the whole time column once: if every period is a number, it sorts numerically; otherwise, if every period is a date such as 2024, 2024-03, 2024-03-31 or 2024-Q1, it sorts by date; otherwise it uses natural text order for all of them, so week 10 follows week 9. A column that mixes numbers, dates and text is not sorted by type cell by cell. You can also keep the order of the file. Impossible dates such as 2023-02-29 are rejected under date order.
• Repeated rows. If the same period and entity appear more than once, the video stops and says how many pairs repeat. Choose to add them up, average them, keep the smallest, the largest or the last row; nothing is combined silently.
• Missing values. By default a missing period stays a gap: the bar or line is absent for that period. You can repeat the last known value or show zero instead, and the video then says so in its status line. Values are never filled backward.
• Index and growth. Index divides by each entity's first non-zero value (= 100); a series that starts below zero has no meaningful index and is left empty. Growth compares each period with the period right before it; after an empty or zero period it is left empty.

Labels are used exactly as written: North and North are two entities. The CSV itself is never changed.

How numbers are read and shown

A value is used only when the whole cell is a plain number, such as 1200, -4.5 or 3e5, with the decimal mark you choose. Cells with units, currency signs or thousands separators (1,200) and numbers that a double can't hold faithfully are left out and counted in a warning, never drawn as zero.

Between two periods the motion is a straight-line blend of the two observed values, and the status line says which periods it moves between. In-between frames are not data. The values table lists exactly what the current frame shows; together with the status line it tells you whether that frame is an observed period, a blend between two periods, or includes values filled by the missing-value rule. Numbers in the video use your language's format with the decimal places you choose; shares and achievement are shown as percentages. If a calculation would produce numbers too large to draw reliably, the tool says so instead of drawing a broken chart.

Video, GIF and PNG downloads

Videos have no sound. The first and last moments hold the first and last period so viewers can read them. Changing the data or settings, or leaving the page, stops a running export so an outdated file is never saved.

Limits and privacy

A video can show up to 500 periods, 200 entities and 100,000 period × entity cells, from files up to 25 MB, 100,000 rows or 2 million cells. For a larger file, filter the rows or summarize them with a pivot table first. For a still chart, use the CSV chart maker.

Everything, including the logo and background images, stays in your browser tab. The file and the video are not uploaded.

Example: revenue by region as a bar chart race

A long table with one row per quarter and region. With time quarter, entity region and value revenue, the race shows three bars per frame. The missing West value for 2024-Q2 stays a gap: West has no bar in that period.

quarter,region,revenue
2024-Q1,North,52
2024-Q1,South,33
2024-Q1,West,69
2024-Q2,North,64
2024-Q2,South,54
2024-Q3,North,76
2024-Q3,South,75
2024-Q3,West,77

{
  "periods": ["2024-Q1", "2024-Q2", "2024-Q3"],
  "series": {
    "North": [52, 64, 76],
    "South": [33, 54, 75],
    "West": [69, null, 77]
  },
  "missing": 1
}