Over on Tableau Public, Judit Bekker create this fantastic directory of charts to help you pick the one that's most appropriate for your analysis.

Check it out below.

We're all in the never ending search for resources that will help us pick the "best" chart for the situation. The Financial Times Graphics team created the Visual Vocabulary to help all of us make better chart choices.


Over the past month, I've been building all of these charts in Tableau so that everyone in the Tableau Community would have examples they could use and learn from. This has been quite the labor of love and I would like to thank the (best) team at The Information Lab for their support, reviews and feedback along the way.

There are 72 charts in total, most of which I built myself or with help of tutorials from the community. To build the violin plot, equalized cartogram, and heat map examples, I prepared the data in Alteryx and the output was shape files. The scaled cartogram was built using Tilegrams by Pitch Interactive based on this tutorial from Ken Flerlage.

While the people listed below may not have been the original creators of the charts, they are the resources I used to create the charts in my workbook.

Chart	Person	Link
Diverging Stacked Bar	Steve Wexler	Data Revelations
Surplus/Deficit Filled Line	Jeffrey Shaffer	Data +Science
Violin Plot	Ben Moss	YouTube / Alteryx App
Sunburst Chart	Leonid Golub	Super Data Science
Arc Chart	Ken Flerlage	KenFlerlage.com
Venn Diagram	Leonid Golub	Super Data Science
Radar Chart	Adam McCann	Dueling Data
Scaled Cartogram	Ken Flerlage	KenFlerlage.com
Sankey Diagram	Leonid Golub	Super Data Science
Chord Diagram	Noah Salvaterra	DataBlick

How to use this workbook

I read an article by Chris Pereira the other day that made an attempt to link the recession to video game usage. In fact, the subtitle is: "With economy troubles, gamers are buying a larger percentage of used games." While there is a link between video game usage and the current recession, this a pretty bold statement given the analysis presented (which Chris built on from a Time magazine article). I'll show you my evidence that backs up Chris in a bit.

The first chart presented by Chris (via Nielsen) analyzes video game usage trends over the last four years. I don't think this chart proves anything more than the fact that video game usage has increased year over year for the last four years...that's it. You simply can't say that the upswing in time spent playing video games in 2009 is due to the recession.



The second chart tries to make the same correlation, but again, I see the same type of trend from 2007-2009 that you see in the first chart. People are just playing more variety of games...that's all. There is absolutely no way from this chart to draw a conclusion that used video game sales are in any way related to the recession.



Ok, so how can I say that it's just a matter of fact observation? Look at this chart (created with Tableau). If you look at the four year trend of hours played, there is a continuous increase is hours played. You might say "I don't see this in 2009." But in each year in May, you see a big decrease in hours played. As Chris says in his evaluation: "May has traditionally seen a drop-off each year (blame the improving weather)." I can see the reasoning there.

You can also see that from 2007-2009, a similar trend can be derived from used game sales.



I tried to find a correlation between hours played and used game sales (since the article says both are related to the recession), but the facts don't support this.



I decided to look at other factors that could correlate the recession to video game hours played to help support Chris' argument. We have been hearing quite a bit regarding the housing crisis and it's impact on the economy. I gathered economic data from FRED and was able to demonstrate that a prolonged decrease in housing starts does indeed indicate that a recession is coming.



My next step was to identify correlations between housing starts and the increase in video game hours played. Based on this analysis, I believe that a much stronger argument can be made the an increase in hours played is a possible indication that a recession is taking place. I set the "hours played" scale to match the Nielsen Data.



I find the color-coding of the years very useful and, to me, the relationship can be clearly seen. As housing starts decrease, video game hours player per week decrease. Since the years are color-coded, you can tie them back to the housing starts/recession trend chart above.

What's the bottom line? I agree with Chris that there is a relationship between video game hours played and the recession, but the way to get there is much more conclusive if you use economic indicators to support the theory.