VizWiz

A Butterfly Chart is (typically) a bar chart where two sets of data series are displayed side by side. The purpose is to allow you to compare the two data series across a dimension. 

Here is an example of a butterfly chart I created for Makeover Monday.

Notice how I have zero at the center and the scales are the same on either side of zero. This helps show how the chart "leans" to one side or the other.

The comparisons would be more difficult to see if the left and right hand sides of the butterfly did not have the same axis scale. In this video, I show you how two examples for creating a butterfly chart.

I don't remember how I came across the set of cartograms I'm going to show you how to create. Alas, I wanted to recreate this mesmerising set of cartograms that Noah Veltman created based on election maps from various media outlets.

In a recent Makeover Monday #WatchMeViz, I showed how to create a bar chart to compare two measures and then add a candlestick chart as well to show the difference between the two measures. It's actually quite simple; it requires some knowledge of:

1. How Measure Names and Measure Values work together
2. How to create a combined axis chart
3. How to create a dual axis chart
4. How to create a Gantt chart

Today's Makeover Monday marked my 1,000th viz published to Tableau Public. I must say that I'm pretty proud of myself. This feels like a pretty big milestone in my career. I wonder how many hours I've spent using Tableau in my life.

Thank you for all of your support and encouragement along the way. Tableau wouldn't be anything without the Community.

Let's get to week 47. The visualization comes from Visual Capitalist.

• The bar/line combination charts work well since they are on the same scale. This also makes them easier to distinguish.
• Choosing colors that match the American flag (I'm assuming that was intentional)
• Making 2020 a slightly different shade of red
• Title is clear
• Text callouts add useful context
• Big numbers to show the most recent values

With Amy Coney Barrett being sped through the confirmation process of the US Senate before the 2020 Election (as hypocritical as it was) to become the 9th justice on the Supreme Court, there is now a conservative stranglehold on the judicial branch of government.

Justice Barrett deflected all questions about her stance on abortion during the confirmation process and it has raised lots of speculation that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Yeah, you know, because the government should control a woman's body, yet there is nothing similar for men. Like, why doesn't a man get castrated if he accidentally impregnates a woman? Blasphemy they say; hypocritical I say.

I wonder if any of the anti-abortion Justice or Congresspeople have ever considered their stance if their daughter had an unplanned pregnancy. What is she got raped and pregnant? I bet their tune would change.

Anyway, my political and social views aside, this made me think about abortion rates in America. Since Roe v. Wade, abortion rates in the US have plummeted.

Twice recently I've used parameter actions to create a single column drill down and drill up to mimic a hierarchy. 

1. HR Analytics KPI Dashboard (Viz • Blog post)
2. Makeover Monday Week 46 (Viz • Blog post)

Thanks for attending #WatchMeViz (link) for #MakeoverMonday Week 46. I enjoy the commentary and ideas you provide along the way. I hope you're learning something as well.

The topic this week was the switch in advertising revenue to the internet.

In the video, I first reviewed the initial visualization and talked about what works and what does. I then iterated through 17 different methods for visualizing the data, before settling on the one below which was inspired by Ellen Blackburn's viz about eligible free school meals and educational attainment (link)

RESOURCES

1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w46
2. Chart Guide - https://chart.guide/

Data HAS to be consumed quickly to be understood and to make quick decisions. A "typical" profit and loss statement is on a spreadsheet. However, spreadsheets are notorious for (1) errors and (2) being very difficult to spot areas of concern.

That's where dashboards come into play. Back in July 2017 I proposed a new way to visualize a Profit & Loss Statement (P&L). The dashboard has been very well received and put into practice at many organizations. They've reported back to me how useful it has been. 

But then I got thinking about an even easier way to visualize the data. I felt like the previous version was a bit chart heavy. So, while I've been creating templates for other areas of a business (HR, Social Media, Customer Service), I decided to also focus on a new version of a P&L statement with KPIs. This dashboard is based on a Finance Dashboard example from Excel Dashboard School.

You can download the data I used to build this template here. Click on the image below to interact with and download the workbook.

For #MakeoverMonday week 45, we were analyzing the software and hardware units sold across several regions, as defined by Nintendo itself. The data was pretty simple. I started by doing some basic data prep to simplify the names of the fields and to pivot the data to make it easier to compare the years.

In this video, I will first review the initial visualization and talk about what works and what does. I then iterate through several methods for visualizing the data, hoping to find one that works well with this data set. With feedback from the viewers, I was able to create a bar chart that compares the percentage of global units sold of software vs. hardware for Nintendo.

I showed several methods for visualizing the data:

1. Line charts (several versions)
2. Stacked bar chart
3. Side-by-Side Bar
4. Tables
5. Scatter plot
6. Connected scatterplot

Resources:

1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w45-dedicated-video-game-sales-units
2. Final visualization - https://bit.ly/MM2020W45
3. Tableau Color Palette Generator - https://color.tableaumagic.com/
4. Colors from Image Tool - https://html-color-codes.info/colors-from-image/
5. ASCII character reference - https://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/27F0-27FF

As part of the training at The Data School, we're often tasked by clients to build industry specific dashboards and/or dashboards that can be used as templates for their organization. Of course what the client can ask for is often much more broad. From a dashboarding perspective, we tend to have the freedom to create what we think works best for their data. This them, in turn, helps create a sort of "brand" for their dashboards internally.

That got me thinking about common use cases for dashboards, dashboards that would likely span industries and companies and could serve as templates for others. In this series, I'll be posting templates that I have been building based on the data and sample dashboards from Excel Dashboard School. 

Let me make it clear that I am in no way criticizing the work they have created. My intent is to build an alternative method for displaying the data as a template in Tableau. The data and templates they have provided are the starting point for my work. I want to thank them for being so kind and sharing their work.

TOPIC

Customer Service Dashboard

RESOURCES

1. Dashboard Overview - https://exceldashboardschool.com/customer-service-dashboard/
2. Data and Interactive Dashboard - https://cdnspeed-exceldashboardsc.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/080_CSD_final.zip

DASHBOARD TEMPLATE

Floating bar charts are similar to Gantt bar charts, except they don't use dates or duration for the length of the bar. In this video, I show you how to use floating bar charts for comparing metrics.

Example 1 - Comparing mental health syndromes between women and men

Example 2 - Comparing year over year sales

Data Sources:

1. Mental Health Symptoms - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w27-comparing-common-mental-disorder-by-sex
2. Superstore 2020.3 - https://data.world/vizwiz/superstore-20203

#MakeoverMonday week 44 is another #Viz5 initiative. The topic this week is access to the internet and mobile phones by gender and country.

First, sorry about the video cutting out at the very end. My mistake.

In this video, I first review the initial visualization and talk about what works and what does. In the end, I went with a quadrant chart, which is a scatter plot with broken up into four quadrants. The viz focuses on only two of the quadrants to highlight the significant difference in the number of countries where women have more access to men for both technologies vs. the opposite.

I showed several methods for visualizing the data:

1. Side-by-Side Bar
2. Bar in bar
3. Bar Graph vs. Reference Line
4. Barbell
5. Peas in a pod
6. Floating bar chart
7. Slope graph (terrible choice)
8. Ranked slope graph (even worse choice)
9. Histograms
10. Box plot
11. Scatter plot

Resources:

1. Final workbook - LINK
2. Data set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w44
3. Country and region information (Be careful joining this as some country names don't match. You'll want to using data blending and alias the country names to match.) - https://data.world/vizwiz/country-region-codes
4. Chart Guide - https://chart.guide/
5. Interactive chart chooser - https://depictdatastudio.com/charts/ 

Unlike traditional maps, tile grid maps allow you to allocate equal space to each geographical area. We've probably all seen hex maps of the United States. Tile Grid Maps are similar, except they are squares with each block being the same shape and size.

In this video, I show you first how to create the tile grid map, then how to overlay time series data. I then show you three different visualization types for the time series. You could easily create bar charts as well.

Enjoy!

Venn diagrams (also called Set diagrams or Logic diagrams) use overlapping circles to illustrate the logical relationships between two or more sets of items. They depict how things relate to each other within a particular segment. 

For example, how many customers made purchases in the East region, in the West region, and in both regions? 

Where the circles overlap, you display text or a value the represents the value associated with the relationship.

I created a Venn diagram for my Visual Vocabulary and while teaching how to create it, I thought of a much simpler way to create them. All of the versions you see online (and the version in the Visual Vocabulary) require you to:

1. Create sets
2. Evaluate how many things are in each set as an aggregate
3. Align the circles according to these values
4. Create a calc to display the text for the overlap with a computed set

For #MakeoverMonday week 43 we analyzed data about apparel exports to the US during the Coronavirus pandemic. In this session of #WatchMeViz, I showed 28 different ways to visualize time series data (there are way more) before we all settled on a viz that's basically the same as the original and looks nicer.

Subscribe to my YouTube channel here to get all of my latest Tableau Tips and notifications for upcoming live streams.

Show Notes / References:

1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w43-apparel-exports-to-us
2. Tableau Reference Guide (incredible repository of thousands of Tableau tips) by Jeffrey Shaffer - http://www.tableaureferenceguide.com/
3. How to Shade Between Two Lines with Polygons by Rody Zakovich - http://www.datatableauandme.com/2017/08/how-to-shade-between-2-lines-in-tableau.html
4. Title Capitalization - https://capitalizemytitle.com/ 

People love maps. Putting dots on a map gives a sense of precision. There are lots of methods for displaying maps. In this video, I show you four:

1. The exact locations
2. Density map
3. Using the ROUND function to generalize the points
4. Using the HEXBIN functions to generalize the points, but at a level controllable by the user