A couple of weeks ago I asked what you all use to analyze and visualize data. Here are the results.

As of writing this, there were 1,112 responses. Thanks for participating, everyone!

Microsoft Excel led the way, like you'd expect, with a 31% share. R was pretty close for a while, but fell behind with a 21% response. This is almost the same as the results from the same poll two years ago. There was a 30/20 split. The newcomer this time around was Tableau, which surprised me, coming up in third with a 6% share. I didn't include Tableau in the previous poll, although a few people did mention it in the comments.

Actionscript/Flash, Illlustrator, Processing, SAS, and pen and paper got their small share.

Finally, there was a wide variety of software mentioned in the comments from those who answered the 'other' category. Some of those included Matlab, SPSS, Stata, and Python.

While I don't think this is representative of the chart-making population, it's easy to see that there's a lot of solutions to interpret data. Here's quickstart guide in case you're wondering what to use.

Will Excel always be the frontrunner?

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• What Do You Primarily Use to Analyze and/or Visualize Data? [POLL]

P.S. I know many of you use a combination of these. Pick your favorite if that's the case.

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• Poll results: What do you use to analyze and/or visualize data?
• What Do You Use to Analyze and/or Visualize Data? [POLL RESULTS]
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So why do you read FlowingData? Punch in your answer in the poll below.

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It's July 4 this weekend. You know what that means, right? It's Independence Day, and really, there's no better way to celebrate than to stuff down as many hot dogs down your throat as you can in ten minutes. Or if that doesn't sound appetizing, you can just enjoy watching the annual Nathan's hot dog eating contest on Coney Island.

Joey Chestnut won the hot dog crown for a second time last year. Will he win again or will Takeru Kobayashi take back the crown? Punch your ticket in the poll below. Take a look at the full version of the graphic above to make a fully educated decision.

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I threw out a random thought a couple of months back. I tweeted, "Remember when computers used to be just for geeks? Now they're ubiquitous. We can do the same for data."

To be honest, I was just babbling, but I've been giving it some thought, and you know, now I'm not so sure. There are so many applications popping up every day that promise to socialize data. To make it the YouTube of data. None of them have really taken off though.

Is it because the visualization tools aren't advanced enough to make data accessible to the common user or is data simply meant to stay in the hands of experts?

So this begs the question:

If yes, what do you think makes data so distant to non-experts? If no, what will it take for non-experts to start interacting with data? Or are they already?

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This shouldn't come as a huge surprise since data is just about everywhere you turn. What I didn't expect though was statistics to lead all areas and programming to only have 6% of all votes. Compare that to a similar poll one year ago where computer science held a strong lead. However, I included web analytics this time around, which I suspect grabbed some from the CS crowd. Information science and cartography also had a strong showing this time around.

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• POLL: What Data-related Area Are You Most Interested In?
• What Do You Use to Analyze and/or Visualize Data? [POLL RESULTS]
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OK, so hypothetical situation. You've got a big data visualization project due in two weeks and a mountain of data. You haven't started yet. It's just you and one data visualizer. Who do you choose? If you select "Other" please do leave a comment on who you'd like to work with.

Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger, has been breaking records left and right. After only 10 days, the movie passed the $300 million mark - faster than any move before it. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was the previous record holder. Pirates did it in 16 days.

So the next record that everyone's wondering about is -- Will Dark Knight make more than $600 million to beat Titanic as the highest grossing film of all time? So far it's been 12 days and has grossed $333,929,159. Punch your answer in the poll below.

How much do you think Dark Knight will make (domestically)? I say it won't do it -- $525 million tops.