Data Visualization · · 4 min read · By Data to Video Editorial
Best Data Formats for Animated Videos
Which data structures work best for animated charts, and how to clean your data before importing it.
The single biggest reason animated chart videos fail is bad data. Not wrong data — badly shaped data. Here's how to prep yours so it drops cleanly into any animated chart tool.
CSV is king
Use a flat CSV with one label column and one numeric column per time step. Avoid merged cells, footnotes inside numeric cells, and currency symbols mixed with numbers.
Time as columns, not rows
For bar chart races, each time step (year, month, season) should be its own column. Each row is one category. This 'wide' format is what every animation engine expects.
Five to ten rows
Bar chart races with more than ten bars are unreadable on a phone. Pre-filter to the top 5–10 entries before importing.
Clean numbers
Strip commas, currency symbols and percent signs. Numbers should be raw — 12500000, not '$12.5M'.
Frequently asked questions
- Does the tool accept Excel files?
- Save as CSV first — UTF-8 with comma separators. The parser handles quoted strings and escaped commas.
About the author
Data to Video Editorial — Editorial team. We test every format we write about. Our editorial team publishes data videos daily across niche TikTok and YouTube accounts and shares what actually moves the needle for creators.