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February 26, 2020

Visualizing the Geography of TV Stations

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It seems to have been a while since I worked on a personal data analysis/visualization project. The one I'm going to take you through below was inspired by a piece of work I saw by Erin Davis (no contact info to link to). Check out her amazing portfolio on her website.

The piece I wanted to replicate in Tableau is based on her beautiful work Visualizing the Geography of FM Radio. Since she had already done this for radio, I thought I'd try to replicate her work, but with TV stations, that is, the strength and coverage that the broadcast signals from TV stations transmit.

First, I had to prep the data. Fortunately the raw data was easily accessible on the FCC website as are explanations of the fields and how to use them. The FCC also have information about which States fall into which FCC regions. I manually grouped the States into their regions in Tableau (it would have needed to be manually created data anyway).

From there, it was some data prep to get the signal boundaries for each state, ensure they are in the correct State (e.g., some stations that were listed in California actually plotted in other States), then export as a TDE (Hyper files don't work well with polygons).

Here's the Alteryx workflow:


For Tableau, I created a custom color palette based on the color legend on Erin's vizzes, replicated her maps as close as possible, and that's it!


Enjoy!

February 25, 2020

#TableauTipTuesday - Deselect Marks with a Highlight Action

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In this video, I show you how to deselect marks with a highlight action. I take you through two use cases:

  1. Using a set action to click on a region and sort a stacked bar chart based on that region, then use a highlight action to deselect the region selected. 
  2. Using a set action to compare quarterly sales to the sales of a selected quarter. Then use a highlight action to deselect the quarter selected.

Enjoy!

February 11, 2020

#TableauTipTuesday - How to float an entire dashboard and a filter

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Let's say I have a tiled dashboard and I need to float one object, like a filter. When you publish the workbook to Tableau Server, the filter objects can move around, thus messing up your design. To get around this, I float my entire tiled dashboard, then I layer the other floating objects in front of that. When you publish, they will then all move together, thus not altering your design.

In this week's tip, I show you just how to accomplish this.