On the train this morning I was catching up on some reading and ran across this post from FiveThirtyEight about Trump's approval rating compared to past presidents at the 175-day mark. In the article, there's this table of the ratings:


The table is ok in that it lists the presidents in descending order by net approval rating. However, I thought a visual display would be more effective. I used Google Sheets to import the table and quickly connected it to Tableau and built a slope graph to more effectively display the data.

It only took about 15 minutes to build this, so I'm surprised FiveThirtyEight didn't include a visual. I wonder what their reasoning is for including a chart vs. a table. What do you think? Which view works better for you?

Inspired by the visualisation by Harry Enten that I highlighted today on my sister site DataVizDoneRight, I decide to look at the New Zealand tourism data again and see if I could build a similar view. After all, no data visualisation is ever “complete”. I really like how this turned out (and thank you to Eva Murray for feedback).

I incorporated a legend on the upper right to make the bars easier to interpret. Basically the grey bar shows the 25th to 75th percentile of all of the regions and the red dot indicates the median of all regions. I’ve removed the total region from the view.