What is sanddance?

SandDance is a data visualization tool from Microsoft Research. It takes data, such as rows in a spreadsheet or database, and turns each row into a visible mark on screen. As you change how the data is grouped or sorted, the marks animate smoothly from one arrangement to another, so you can follow along and spot patterns without losing track of where things moved. You can use SandDance in several ways. There is a free web app you can open in a browser. It also ships as an extension for Visual Studio Code (a popular code editor), as a plugin for Power BI (Microsoft's business analytics tool), and as an extension inside Azure Data Studio (a database management app). A third-party data notebook platform called Observable also supports it. For developers who want to add SandDance to their own applications, the project is split into modular JavaScript packages. The core package handles the visualization canvas. A React-compatible version exists for apps built on that framework. An explorer package adds a user interface for interactive data exploration. An embed package makes it easy to drop the whole explorer into any web page using a single HTML element. SandDance was built by a research group inside Microsoft that studies new forms of data visualization. The underlying chart layout relies on Vega, an open-source grammar for building interactive charts. Animations require a browser with WebGL2 support, which most modern browsers have.