Where to find public datasets to tell your stories

It can be tricky to find relevant public datasets online

Whether you’re looking for data to support your research or you’re digging for story ideas, there’s plenty of public datasets available you can use.

The growing availability of online data in Australia is great for transparency, however  it is becoming more difficult to find the most up-to-date, accurate and relevant datasets among all the noise.

That’s why we put together this regularly updated list of datasets we trust for visualisations in Vizall. If you have any suggestions to add to the list, please reach out to us via email, Facebook or Instagram.

Caption: Australian public datasets available as a free download. Created using Vizall.

What’s next?

Hopefully you found the data you were looking for. The next step is making sense of it.

Spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel allow you to clean, sort and filter data to find insights, while online tools such as Infogram and Flourish can help you visualise your data so its easy to interpret. 

Vizall helps you do everything in one place with the assistance of automation, including:

  • Data cleaning such as fixing spelling errors in columns filled with addresses, suburbs or many other location types;
  • data summaries showing most frequently used words, maximum, minimum and more and;
  • visualisations that are nice to look at, easy to create and simple to share online with embed links or codes.

What if I get stuck?

Finding stories and insights in data can be hard, but we want you to succeed! That’s why we set up the Data Literacy Facebook community for you to ask us questions, share data issues and get tips from the team about the best way forward.

To get access, join Vizall for free at app.vizall.com.au/signup.

You can also read the Getting Started blog post for tips on prepping your data and creating searchable tables or interactive maps.

And finally, we love hearing from you! Please send us an email if you’re unsure about how to approach your data project and we’ll be happy to help.