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January 30, 2023

#MakeoverMonday 2023 Week 5 - Where can you find a cheap slice of pizza in New York City?

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This week's data set was simple to understand, yet provided me quite the challenge to visualize. The data comes from Liam Quigley and it's a record of prices of slices of pizza he's tried in NY. Quantified self at its best!

Check out the recording below and you will learn how to:

  1. Prepare the data: calculations, joins, spatial intersections, and more
  2. Create maps: hexbin maps, map layers, spatial joins, using maps as shapes
  3. Create line charts and heat maps that are simple and effective (don't overcomplicate things)
  4. Build a dashboard using layout containers

Thanks for watching! There's an image of my viz below the video. Check out the interactive version here.


November 1, 2022

#MakeoverMonday Week 44 - Fundraising vs. Spending by Members of the 117th Congress

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The midterm elections in the US are next week. If you're able to vote, please do. Democracy is at stake. 

This week's data was about fundraising, spending and debt by people currently in Congress. If you missed #WatchMeViz, I showed 16 different ways to visualize this data set. Hopefully they give you a bit of inspiration for creating your own.

Catch up with the show below. In the end, I went with a bar chart that compares funds raised vs. spent by State. I also have a gantt bar to show the difference between the two. I have a tutorial of that chart here.

Below this video is an image of the dashboard I created. Click on it to see the interactive version on Tableau Public.


September 19, 2022

#MakeoverMonday Week 38 - American Business Applications

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Well, this was a pretty epic fail. No, it was a really big fail. Those that tuned in to Watch Me Viz will be well aware of my struggles with this data set. I don't know why. Maybe it was a concentration issue. I hope it was still useful to everyone, and I hope it was good to see someone with so much experience still struggle.

My original idea was to compare each State to the US average. I got the calculations right, but it was thoroughly uninteresting. Basically, the variance rarely changed. Therefore, there was nothing to see in the analysis.

I stopped the livestream after 90 minutes, the audience and I had suffered enough. Afterwards, I took a break and came back to Tableau. This time, I thought more clearly through the solution I was trying to create. Basically, I wanted something very much like the original, just a bit better looking.

It turns out I was overcomplicating the implementation and the calculations. Parameters were a much, much better solution and allowed me the flexibility I needed to create the month over month calculations. 

I'd encourage you to check out the video. I tried lots of different things and explained what I was doing along the way, so you're sure to learn something. My final dashboard is below the video.

Have a great week everyone and thank you for being so supportive of Makeover Monday.


September 5, 2022

#MakeoverMonday 2022 Week 36 - Median Age at First Marriage in America

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This was a relatively simple data set and I was able to build quite a few vizzes during Watch Me Viz. I ended up with something more complex that it needed to be, but it was fun figuring out how to create the calculations.

Here's how it works:

  1. Compare the median age at first marriage of each state to the US average for 2006-2010
  2. Compare the median age at first marriage of each state to the US average for 2015-2019
  3. Check whether the State 
    1. Stayed above the US average in both time periods
    2. Stayed below the US average in both time periods
    3. Moved from below the US average to above the US average
    4. Moved from above the US average to below the US average

Got it? Yes, it a bit confusing. In the end, we were able to highlight 6 states that moved above the US average to below the US average. All others stayed the same. What does this mean from an analytical perspective? Probably nothing, but it looks better than the original.

Check out the viz below the video or here.

June 14, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 24: Which States Have the Highest Average Student Loans?

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If you watch this week's #WatchMeViz (below), you'll get a good look at how I use containers to create a dashboard. I didn't iterate very much this week, as far as the number of charts is concerned, but I did mess around way too long when trying to create a hex inside of a hex map. HINT: It turned out terrible.

Resources:
  1. Final workbook
  2. U.S. Hexmap Shapefile (credit: Joshua Milligan)


May 4, 2021

How to Create a Layered Hex Map with a Spatial File

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In this tip, I show you how to use a spatial file to overlap hexagons on a map. This technique is much simpler, looks better, and is easier to maintain.

Typically when you want to create an overlapping hex map, you will use a template that has x/y coordinates for the rows and columns, hex shapes, then try to pack them together until they look just right. But then you put them into a dashboard and the sizes need to be adjusted again. What a pain!

Watch this tip to see the simple way to create layered hex maps.

RESOURCE: Hex map template via Joshua Milligan here


October 29, 2020

How to Create Time Series Tile Grid Maps

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Unlike traditional maps, tile grid maps allow you to allocate equal space to each geographical area. We've probably all seen hex maps of the United States. Tile Grid Maps are similar, except they are squares with each block being the same shape and size.

In this video, I show you first how to create the tile grid map, then how to overlay time series data. I then show you three different visualization types for the time series. You could easily create bar charts as well.

Enjoy!

October 20, 2020

#TableauTipTuesday: Four Methods for Creating Dots on a Map

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People love maps. Putting dots on a map gives a sense of precision. There are lots of methods for displaying maps. In this video, I show you four:

  1. The exact locations
  2. Density map
  3. Using the ROUND function to generalize the points
  4. Using the HEXBIN functions to generalize the points, but at a level controllable by the user

September 21, 2020

Watch Me Viz - #MakeoverMonday 2020 Week 38 - Pick Up A Book And Read

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This week I went through a TON of iterations before settling on a hex map of Europe. In the video, you'll see me build lots of charts with time series, deviations, etc. before settling on a hexmap of Europe. 

Download the workbook here. 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel here to get all of the latest content and please share this is if you find it useful. 

Here are a few useful links... 

  1. Geometrics shapes (for the default number formatting) - LINK 
  2. FIXED Level of Detail Expressions in a Plain English Sentence - LINK 
  3. TABLE CALCULATIONS in a Plain English Sentence - LINK 
  4. Shading between two lines - LINK 
  5. Daniel Rowlands - TWITTER 
  6. Daniel Rowlands (EU hex map template) - LINK

Click on the image below the video to interactive with the workbook. Or download it from Tableau Public here.


April 30, 2018

Makeover Monday: Annual Change in American Bee Colonies

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This week Makeover Monday is collaboration with #VizForSocialGood to analyze bee colonies in America. The data and visualization come from Bee Informed.


What works well?


  • When you hover over a state, the value is indicated on the color legend.
  • Informative tooltips
  • Good filtering capabilities to customize the view
  • Very responsive tooltips
  • Displaying the states and territories outside the continental US separately

What could be improved?

  • A diverging color scale is typically used to indicate positive and negative values. In this case, all values are positive.
  • If you do want to use a diverging palette, the colors should merge at the median.
  • A filled map makes smaller state difficult to compare to larger states.
  • There's no sense of the change over time. Are colonies increasing or decreasing?

My Goals

  • Create small multiple maps that show each year
  • Make the story about the change, rather than the specific values
  • Use highlight actions to make it easy to see a state across all maps
  • Incorporate the total annual loss into the tooltip

December 20, 2017

Workout Wednesday: State by State Profit Ratio

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This is the last Workout Wednesday from me this year. Emma still has one more next week. As for next year, we haven't decided what to do yet.

For today's challenge, you'll need two data sets: Superstore Sales (the one we always use for WW) and the hex map template.

Requirements

  1. You are NOT allowed to use blending.
  2. Create a small multiple hex map showing profit ratio by state.
  3. Color the hexagons using the Sunrise-Sunset Diverging color palette
  4. Match the tooltips on all of the charts
  5. Include a summary heatmap by year and month at the bottom of the map
  6. Everything in the dashboard needs to be tiled
  7. Ensure there is no gap between the hex map and the heatmap. The column divider lines must match up.
  8. Include a sparkline of profit ratio by quarter with labels on the ends of the lines.
  9. Ensure there is enough space for the labels on the sparkline, but you CANNOT manually fix the axis. Make it dynamic via calculations.
  10. Clicking on a state should update the sparkline, update the heatmap, and highlight the state in the hex map. Mississippi  and West Virginia are good test cases to ensure it's working.
  11. The dashboard should be 700x700.

That's it! This is one of the easiest challenges this year from me. It's a good way to bring together a lot of what we've learned this year.

Good luck!

October 25, 2017

Overcoming Burnout, Hexbin Maps and New York City's Urban Forest

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I wrote Monday about how I'm suffering from a bit of Makeover Monday burnout. Thank you to all of you who wrote messages of concern and asked how you could help. MM takes A TON of work, many more hours than people realize, which leads to ebbs and flows where I feel either a lack of motivation or a lack of interest. I'm merely in one of those downward cycles.

How do I overcome burnout?

For me, the best way to overcome burnout isn't to stop; that would mean not doing what I love to do. What works for me is to switch to something in my backlog, to work on a project I've been putting off, to learn something new or maybe to practice a technique. This helps re-energize me. 

I can't recommend this strategy to everyone; burnout is tough. Sometimes the right decision IS to stop everything, to decompress, to get away from it all. I've done that before and it works as well. More often than not, though, I get sad when I'm not using Tableau. It's a product that has fundamentally changed my life. I'm an addict.

New York City's Urban Forest

Last night while I was preparing for Workout Wednesday, I had an idea to practice hexbin maps. Why that popped into my head I have no idea, but I went with it. I looked for a dataset that would work well as hexbins. I searched my emails and found this visualisation about trees in New York City. Fortunately NYC makes the location of every tree available here.

Why does this dataset work well with hexbin maps? According to Mapbox:
Binning is a great alternative technique for visualizing density when working with large data sets. 

Creating hexbin maps in Tableau is quite simple. All you have to do is follow this tutorial by Matt Chambers. It can prove a bit tedious to get the size of the bins just right, which is why I chose to use a parameter to speed up my development.

So, burnout temporarily overcome and I got to practice a technique I hadn't used in a while. That's a win win for me! Enjoy!

March 8, 2017

Workout Wednesday: UK House Prices Hexbin Maps

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Another great learning experience today for me thanks to Emma! This week required us to create hexbin maps in Tableau. I'd never done these before, so I got stuck in, knowing I'd come out of it have learned something.

Let's start with Emma's requirements:

  1. Create the hexbin map based on the District 
  2. Change the size of the hexagon using a parameter
  3. Match the sunrise-sunset diverging colour palette on the hexagons
  4. Match the tooltips and titles
  5. Set the dashboard size to 650 * 700 pixels

Fortunately Emma linked to a blog post by Matt Chambers for how to use the HEXBINX and HEXBINY functions. This made the exercise immensely easier because all I really needed to do was swap out [Ratio] in the blog post with my parameter.

I couldn't get the total in my title to match, though I knew I had done it right. It turns out Emma used an LOD that returns the average for both years, not just the year selected. I decided to use the year selected because that reflects what's in the map. I also create this value with a table calc since all of the dimensions I needed were already in the view.

Also, requirement #2 to change the size is actually a requirement to change the denstiy, i.e., how many hexabins are created. So, I decided to also size the hexagons based on how many are displayed in the view. So if you enter a smaller number, the hexagons are bigger. Enter a big number and the hexagons are smaller. I also limited the parameter to between 20-200.

Lastly, I floated everything since the color legend had to be floated above the hexmap. I find that Tableau works best when you go either 100% float or 100% tiled.

Nice fun challenge! Learned a bunch!

July 4, 2016

Makeover Monday: Where Are the Best & Worst States to Raise a Child in America?

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This week the UK Zens are on Tour and we’re taking Makeover Monday on the road with us. And it’s Independence Day in America so I chose a visualisation about raising children in America. Happy birthday ‘Merica!



What works well?

  • Nice big titles make it easy to know what the map is about
  • The colors make is easy to see the good and bad concentrations.
  • Alaska and Hawaii are neatly brought in under the continental U.S.


What doesn’t work?

  • The ranges for the colors are equivalent.
  • Using a filled map could lead to visually distortion; poor Rhode Island!
  • The separate maps that you have to page through make comparisons too difficult.
  • There’s no way to see a State’s ranking in all categories at once.


I iterated through lots of ideas this week and found two that I think work well.

  1. I changed the filled map to a hex map then put all of the maps side by side.
  2. I created heat maps and bump charts that show the individual State rankings in each category.
  3. I added bar charts in the tooltips.
  4. I included highlighting interactivity. 

Both views are shown below. Which one do you prefer?


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