Analytics & Testing

Silk: Turn Data and Spreadsheets into Published Visualizations

Have you ever had a spreadsheet that had a fantastic collection of data and you just wanted to visualize it – but testing and customizing the built-in charts within Excel was too difficult and time-consuming? What if you wanted to add data, manage it, upload it and even share those visualizations?

You can with Silk. Silk is a data publishing platform.

Silks contain data on a specific topic. Anyone can browse a Silk to explore data and create beautiful interactive charts, maps and web pages. To date, millions of Silk pages have been created.

Here’s an Example

Visit the Top 15 Biggest Social Networks Silk to view, share or even embed the visualizations created from this data collection. Here’s a live embed of a bar chart of user statistics:

Silk Features

  • Make documents interactive – Instead of sending out static PDFs, spreadsheets or links from Google Docs, use Silk to make a fully interactive site that engages users and encourages them to play with your data.
  • Embed interactive data anywhere – Take your Silk visualizations and use them all over the web. Embed them in Tumblr, WordPress, and many other publishing platforms.
  • Add tags to make your work sortable by medium, style, or any category you choose. By adding location data, you can also build maps.

To put Silk to use, I exported our keyword rankings from

Semrush and quickly built out a visualization that let me sort order and view keywords where I had some high rankings and there was a ton of search volume… basically letting me know where some optimization and promotion could drive a lot more traffic. I could do this by sorting and filtering the data… but the visualization definitely made it stand out more!

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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