Chord Diagram

Chord Chart is a visualization method of displaying the relationship or trans-flows among different items. The data will be arranged around a circle and the relationships between them will be plotted as arcs.

Starting from Origin2021, user can create such cool diagram from a matrix form datasheet, which shows the import/export trade among several countries. The direction is from the column to the row. For example, the cell(1, 2)=337.8 means Canada exported goods of 337.8 billion dollars to the US at that year.

Matrix data for creating chord diagram in a worksheet

Highlighting all data and one can directly call the template under Plot menu Categorical group to make this wool ball.

Interface for chord data configuration. Notices the layout direction and X/Y source.

On the graph, one can click to highlight or mouse over to display the tooltip to exam the detailed data this arc is representing.

Highlighted arc in a chord plot

There are quite a lot of detailed settings in the Plot Details dialog such as gap between nodes (the area on the circle edge what each country took), sorting method (by data or layout order), etc., besides regular style formatting. The overall interface design is very similar to the existing Alluvial plot.

One of the special switches I’d like to mention here is that, if one is not interested in the detailed in/out transactions as it shows above, but more like to combine the flows and see it from a broader view to see the overall ratio of exchanges between two agents. The Ratio Layout can be applied by the Layout tab from the Plot Details dialog.

Ratio layout chord diagram

Back to the previous graph, with the title added, we can end up with the following graph. Download this project file to try.

See more wonderful visualization and analysis examples in our Learning Center.

About S Z

Male, single, alive.

View all posts by S Z →

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *