Graphs in PowerPoint using Graphviz – Graph Visualization Software

There are many ways to create simple graphs in PowerPoint, as we pointed in our previous article on How to Make Graphs in PowerPoint 2010, however if you need to make more complex graphs and show them in a PowerPoint presentation there are other techniques that we can use. Remember that Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. Graphs are widely used as a visualization tool in many different domains for example networking, bioinformatics, software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains.

GraphViz is an Open Source Graph Visualization software that contains many different layout programs enabling you to select a different type of graph based on an input, that can be a simple text file with the graph information.

It also contains a web graphical interface and other interactive graphical interfaces with auxiliary tools, libraries and language bindings that enables you to support graphs in your own applications without too much effort. Many commercial projects also incorporate Graphviz and even there are libraries that you can use in C# or .NET to use Graphviz for development purposes.

GraphViz takes graph information from a simple text language and make diagrams in useful format like SVG, PDF, as well as other image output formats. You can also support GXL that is the XML format instead.

You can also configure the way graph diagrams are displayed including the color of the graphs, nodes, lines, layouts, links, roll and custom shapes. The output graph format includes many different layouts like dot hierarchical graphs, neato spring model layout, fdp spring model layout, sfdp multiscale version layout for large graphs, twopi for radial layouts, etc.

This video clarifies how is possible to use Graphviz to generate nice graphs that can be used in PowerPoint presentations.