In this week's Watch Me Viz, I started by showing the original visualization, demonstrated how to make a non-geographical field geographical, and then I spent lots of time working through set action drill down.

I showed how to do drill down to two and three levels of dimensions in a hierarchy. Lastly, while building the dashboard, I also showed how to move fields you select in an action to the top of the view with a sorting calculation.

Enjoy!

As Lorna mentions in the week 11 challenge, the key is in the data prep. Once you have that, the visualization is really simple.
I then renamed Pivot Field Names to "Year" and changed the data type to Number (whole) and also renamed Pivot Field Values to "Values".

What a fun dataset! Thank you for your ideas during #WatchMeViz. Here are the video and final visualization.

It seems to have been a while since I worked on a personal data analysis/visualization project. The one I'm going to take you through below was inspired by a piece of work I saw by Erin Davis (no contact info to link to). Check out her amazing portfolio on her website.

The piece I wanted to replicate in Tableau is based on her beautiful work Visualizing the Geography of FM Radio. Since she had already done this for radio, I thought I'd try to replicate her work, but with TV stations, that is, the strength and coverage that the broadcast signals from TV stations transmit.

First, I had to prep the data. Fortunately the raw data was easily accessible on the FCC website as are explanations of the fields and how to use them. The FCC also have information about which States fall into which FCC regions. I manually grouped the States into their regions in Tableau (it would have needed to be manually created data anyway).

From there, it was some data prep to get the signal boundaries for each state, ensure they are in the correct State (e.g., some stations that were listed in California actually plotted in other States), then export as a TDE (Hyper files don't work well with polygons).

Here's the Alteryx workflow:


For Tableau, I created a custom color palette based on the color legend on Erin's vizzes, replicated her maps as close as possible, and that's it!


Enjoy!

In this tip, I show you how to use set actions to create a map that allows the user to click on a region and show the states for the region, but keeping all other areas at the region level.