I've already written about what works and what doesn't about the original visualization (read it here) and since the two current The Data School cohorts had to create a Makeover Monday viz in an hour, I thought I should do the same.

I wanted to create a calendar view that only show the Executive Time. It's easy enough to filter to just that data, however, there are days when there was no executive time, which led to holes in the calendar. To overcome this, I created an Excel spreadsheet with every day from 1 December 2018 through 31 January 2019, then I joined the two data sets, ensuring that my Excel spreadsheet was the primary data source so that all dates would be in the data set (in other words, NOT an inner join).

From there, creating the calendar was simple, adding the color was simple. I spent most of my time fiddling with the formatting.

Click on the image below for the interactive version.

Axios published a fascinating article and data set last week with details of President Trump's hourly schedule. To say "Executive Time" is a major part of his day would be a gross understatement. The article doesn't give any specifics about how that time is actually spent, however it does provide some interesting insight:

• Trump usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time.
• He spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.
• Trump doesn't take an intelligence briefing until 11am or 11:30am, and they only last 30 minutes.

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?

On January 20th, we’ll have a new President of the United States. With Inauguration Day just a few days away, it seemed appropriate to look at the tweet of President-Elect Trump for Makeover Monday week 3. BuzzFeed News analyzed all the accounts Donald Trump retweeted during his presidential campaign and created this visualisation to accompany it (Note: The visualisation was trimmed for this blog) -

What works well?

• The bubbles are ordered from largest to smallest from left to right in a Z-pattern making it pretty simple who he tweets the most.
• Colouring inactive accounts so they are easier to identify

What could be improved?

• Bubble charts are notoriously hard to use for comparison; a simple bar chart would be so much easier to read.
• The viz lacks insight or a story.
• The article has some in-depth writing; would have been great to include that in the visualisation.

I must admit that I struggled a bit this week. I was trying too many charts and had trouble focusing my story. On top of that, I messed up the TDE that I created for everyone. Note that when you use the DATEPARSE function hh means hour in am/pm (1~12) whilst HH means hour in day (0~23). I had used hh initially which made it look like Trump takes lunch off from Twitter.

I really liked Eva’s idea of using the Montserrat font that’s on Trump’s website, so I’ve knicked that idea. I also wanted to stick to Twitter’s official color palette and try as much as possible to quantify and simplify the amount of tweets that Trump produces. With these in mind, here’s my Makeover Monday week 3 visualisation:

I had an idea as I headed into work this morning for another view for the election data for Makeover Monday week 42. I wanted to look at the latest forecast (i.e., Oct 12) and look at the discrepancy by State. I also really enjoyed this because it went from idea to created in about 15 minutes.

I think this view helps show much better than my last version that gap between Clinton and Trump. I also included a sorting option so you can look at it from different perspectives.

This week for Makeover Monday we look at election forecasting data by Drew Linzer and visualised both on his website (Votamatic.org) and on Daily Kos Elections. I first met Drew back in 2012 when I asked him to come speak at Facebook. When I tell people who Drew is, I say that he does the same kind of work as Nate Silver, except he's transparent about how his models work.

Given that we're nearing the end of the election cycle (thank god!), we thought it would be a good time to see how the races are stacking up. First, let's look at the viz from Daily Kos:


What works well?

• The interactivity is amazing!
• Nice summary on the left
• The dots for the polls add nice context
• Simple and easy to understand
• Great overall design
• Great use of color

It’s election time, so time for an election viz. You will notice this is very similar to the RealClearPolitics version the difference being that I am calculating the 2-week average of all polls in their data set.

This little project also provided me a chance to try out the new Google Sheets connector in Tableau 10 and allow the extract to refresh on Tableau Public. In addition, I learned how to scrape a table from the web in a Google Sheet via this blog post, which should (if I did it right) update automatically.

This was also another chance for me to test out the Device Designer that came with Tableau 10. Enjoy!