I was struggling with the wording of my dashboard, so I posted it on Convo for feedback from my colleagues. Here's what I posted:

Nope! That doesn't work either. So back to the drawing board I went. Ben Jones and Jonni Walker were visiting The Data School today so I asked for their feedback. Ben suggested directional arrows and pointed me to his blog post for creating the arrow shapes I needed.

The next step was to take the slope graph and make it directional arrows, focusing only on those counties that switched from Republican to Democrat. From there, it made sense to split the map into two by election to give side-by-side maps and shade the counties by the party that won and the percentage of the vote.

Lastly, I cleaned up the titles and I was done. Fun exercise and I learned quite a bit about directional arrows and the Democratic stripe that goes straight through the middle of Alabama.

In late November, Cork Gaines of Business Insider wrote about how the University of Alabama football team makes and spends its money. The two articles were accompanied by these two pie charts:

There are many issues with these charts:

1. They are pie charts, which makes comparing the slices difficult.
2. The slices are not labeled with the amount, so I have to make some guesses as to their contribution to the whole and then multiply that by the total shown in the titles. That's way too much work.
3. There are categories missing from the source data.
4. Why are these in two separate articles since they are a related story? Why aren't they combined in a single story?
5. There's no mention of the profit the football team turns.

College football season is nearly upon us and for those that live in the Southeastern US, college football is king. It dominates EVERYTHING - from sports talk to newspapers to online forums to Facebook posts to coaching salaries. College football = Life to so many people. If you've never been to an SEC football game, add it to your bucket list; it's an experience unlike any other.


Saturday Down South is a website dedicated to all things SEC football. This past Thursday, they published this list of the salaries for each coach in the SEC (except for Vanderbilt who does not publish their coach's salary).


This list is simple enough, yet when I saw it, I felt like there was more of a story in there. You can clearly see, just from the table, that Nick Saban is a huge outlier. He's a winner, and he gets paid to win. Keep in mind that these are only their base salaries too. Bonuses, appearance fees, etc. are not included.

I decided to use Tableau's story points for the first time to answer a couple of key questions:

1. How much of an outlier is Saban compared to his peers in the SEC, to other coaches in other sports and to other college football coaches?
2. How widespread is this level of pay for college football coaches and how does the SEC stack up?
3. Is Saban worth the money?

I also need to give a quick thank you to Emily Kund and Matt Francis for reviewing this story for me.

Some things I've learned while using Story Points for the first time:

• If you want to tell a story, know the questions you want to answer ahead of time. This will help you plan the beginning, middle and end of the story.
• As I answered questions, I was led to more questions, which led to finding more data, which led to a better story. Be prepared to iterate.
• Story Points are pretty inflexible. You can't do any formatting of you viz once you're inside the Story Point. You have to go back to the original worksheet to change anything. I had expected this to work more like editing a viz on a dashboard.
• I feel like I'm not quite using Story Points as they were intended. I feel like I'm missing their intent in this attempt because I could have done all of this same formatting with multiple dashboards and tabs. I need to learn more about the “idea” behind Story Points.

Download the data here and the Tableau workbook here.