The Data School launched this week and on the consultants' second day, we brought them into an all day training class with the rest of the Information Lab team. One of the courses we taught was advanced visualisations. The reason we run these internal training classes is because we have a core belief in continuous learning.

As part of this exercise, we were building a dot plot and Laszlo Zsom asked how to connect two dots on the same row.  I hadn't ever done it before, so I used a Gantt chart to connect them. Then Chris Love suggested using lines.

In this week's tip (two days late as it is), I demonstrate both of these methods.  Click on the image below to enjoy the video.

Retired Two-time Alteryx Grand Prix Champ Chris Love put a post on G+ today to the Information Lab team asking us to test a new Alteryx module he’s working on. The gist of it is:

1. You put a bunch of PDFs into a folder (as many as you’d like)
2. Run the Alteryx module
3. Alteryx spits out a Tableau extract and workbook that count how many times each word appears in the PDFs

Keep an eye on The Information Lab Blog for more details. Chris is going to write a post soon on how he built this. It’s genius!

For my testing, I decide to run the module against the PDFs of the course materials that Stephen Few gives you at his Visual Business Intelligence Workshop. These PDFs average 25MB (i.e., that’s a lot of words). Chris provided a simple word cloud output as part of the package he wrote. I took that and added a bar chart and a parameter. Anyone that uses Alteryx is going to love what Chris created, pun intended.