In this session I first reviewed the original visualization, then went into data discovery and analysis before finishing with a new visualization.  Watch the video and interaction with the visualization below.

The 2018-19 Premier League season kicks off tomorrow night with an enticing match between Manchester United and Leicester City. This reminded me about a viz I had created at the end of the last season as a way of practicing stepped lines in Tableau.

When I originally created this, I had to use table calcs to get the stepped lines to work, which can get complicated and is very time consuming. Now with stepped lines, it merely a matter of changing the lines type.

I decided to add in a couple of user options:

1. Which team do you want to highlight?
2. How do you want to compare the teams? By total points for the season of the final position in the table?
3. Not all teams have been in the EPL for all 17 years, so I provided an option to filter down to just the teams that have been in the EPL for the user specified number of years.

I've seen lots of headlines in the US since March about how bad the flu outbreak was this year, so I did a bit of googling and found this week's Makeover Monday topic. The chart we are to makeover comes from the CDC.

What works well?

• Clearly marking the x-axis so that it's evident that the weeks don't start at the beginning of the year
• Including the national baseline for context
• Chart dimensions scaled properly
• Using red for the most recent season so that it stands out more

What could be improved?

What I did

As the Winter Olympics started a few days ago, Rody Zakovich offered up his great Winter Olympics viz for a makeover. It can often be tough to makeover an already good viz, but I gave it a go anyway. Here's Rody's viz:

What works well?

What could be improved?

What did I do?

Inspired by Mike Cisneros' viz this week, I thought I would look at the cumulative distance each turkey vulture traveled. And, as a bonus, I wanted to use stepped lines, which are not yet available in Tableau. Fortunately, Rody Zakovich has written a great, easy to follow tutorial.

In addition to the stepped lines, I wanted to be able to compare all the birds on the same baseline. I created a calculation for quarters since each bird was tagged and then calculated the running total of the distance along the quarters. Standardizing the data this way helps me to see which bird flew the farthest (Leo) and which bird has flown to longest (Irma, which really means Irma has been tagged the longest).

Lastly, I sent the viz to Eva for some feedback and she suggested swapping the axes so that distance was on the X and time on the Y. This definitely makes more sense since distance is the independent variable.

Fun learning exercise and Rody's blog really makes creating stepped lines so, so much easier.

WARNING: This weeks workout won't be as easy as it may look. If you're anything like me, by the end you'll be saying stepped lines can't come into Tableau soon enough! It's good practice to know how to actually make this chart without that feature though. Anyone know when stepped lines are actually coming BTW?

This data set first caught my eye a few weeks ago and I highlighted it on my Data Viz Done Right site. Your task this week it to more or less replicate the stepped line chart in Tableau as I've done. Here are the requirements:

1. Create the stepped line chart (HINT: I didn't do this only with lines).
2. Match the dynamically updating title. It changed when you pick a single county vs. all counties.
3. Each stepped line represents a year.
4. Allow the user to pick a year to highlight in black. All others should be grey.
5. Match my tooltip (easy peasy).
6. Label only the end of the line that is highlighted.
7. Match my axis lines.
8. Match the month formatting.
9. Final dashboard should be 800x500 and should be all tiled (no floating elements)
10. Optional: Match my font throughout (Avenir)