The next time someone asks for help sharing the figures you just produced – go tell them to Swivel on it – then quickly tell them, before they chase you down to the coffee machine, that you are actually referring to a very useful website service called Swivel.

Let’s face it – we generate a lot of data, especially at work. Much of the time this is because we are either unable to share the data that already exists or we simply aren’t aware of it. The purpose of Swivel is to help you “See, understand and share numbers” – some anecdote about a picture being worth a thousand words is probably apt somewhere around here but you can share raw data as easily as charts. As the developers tell us “Swivel is a website where people share reports of charts and numbers. Swivel is free for public data, and charges a monthly fee to people who want to use it in private”.

Swivel, at it’s heart, is a data sharing service that allows people to share their information quickly and easily. It’s not a visualisation or analysis tool but what it does is get your insightful and often valuable information seen by more people. Getting information seen by more people means it can be used in useful, new, and often innovative ways – you can also benefit from increased feedback and more in-depth analysis through crowd sourcing.

Some of the key features of Swivel include:

• The ability to upload Excel files and retain formatting
• Create new spreadsheets on the fly within Swivel
• Including editing and formatting functions
• Saving files created online
• Creating charts from your data
• Create new views and charts quickly – once your file is online
• To create a chart you just need to arrange the data (such as date or category), remove any extraneous data from the chart, remove any summary or total rows – that’s it. Once the chart is created you can easily format the style for example Bar, Line, Area, Pie or Scatter charts.
• Pop a Swivel view onto your company intranet, wiki, website or blog
• Work on data created by other people
• Create closed groups to privately share your information
• Connect to live data sources
• If you have important information on Quickbooks,  Salesforce.com, Scoutlabs, Google docs, or others you can connect directly to it using Swivel

Swivel is free if you make your data public, and if you want to use the services but keep your data private there is a monthly subscription fee.

To learn more about sharing your numbers visit Swivel.