I found this very helpful compilation of all the chart types you can make with Tableau at Alan Smithee Presents. Alan Smithee is apparently a pseudonym, so it’s unclear if he (she?) works for Tableau, but either way, the compilation is excellent for understanding how to construct the different chart types. There are also some …
Category Archive
for: ‘Bar Charts’
Embedding Excel Workbooks (could easily be a dashboard)
Microsoft web apps are advancing nicely now – you are no longer tied to Facebook as the way to share documents – you can use Microsoft’s Skydrive. You can also embed documents, as shown below. I’ve recreated a table from an organization called the Third Way, “the leading moderate think-tank of the progressive movement”, apparently. …
Using Google Chart API to create dashboards and sparklines
A few posts back I talked about using a plugin to the jquery javascript library to create sparklines in blog posts. One of my readers suggested using Google’s chart api to instead create the sparklines. From Google: What is the Google Chart API? The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts with a URL …
Who did we declare independence from again?
The fourth of July is Independence Day in the US. 1,004 US residents were asked who independence was declared from. The results? A little concerning, shall we say. Here’s the response via a Tableau dashboard. Dashboard 1
American Time Use Survey – How the WSJ could do better
I recently posted about how the Wall Street Journal’s graphical interpretation of the American Time Use Survey left something to be desired. Their choice of both multiple pie charts and stacked bars with too many segments made comparisons difficult. The time use survey is essentially “how does the average American spend their day” with categories …
Oops, but how to best present these data
This chart has been posted in a variety of places over the last week (@Flowingdata). Purportedly from UCSB’s newspaper, clearly (hopefully?) an earlier version of the graphic was submitted for printing in error. It got me thinking a little about how to display this information in the best way. As with any charting decision you …
Using charts to emphasize results: S&P vs. Life Policy
Couldn’t resist breaking this chart down from New York Life. It shows how $15,000 invested 10 years ago would have faired by either placing it in the S&P500 or in a life policy. There are a number of marketing ‘choices’ that while perhaps not deliberately misleading, certainly emphasize the performance of the life policy. The …
What our kids are learning
Being in the data business, I tend to critique most charts or visualizations I see. I am pleased to note that not only is my son’s kindergarten already pushing an understanding of data, but that so far the charts have all been of the bar variety. While of course one could labor on the excessively …
Normalizing data: Haiti donations by country using Many Eyes
Two things to talk about in this post – I continue my ramblings about the online viz tool Many Eyes, and discuss how normalizing data can provide radically different insights into data. The data set I’m using is the donations by countries (government and corporations, but not private) to earthquake relief in Haiti. I’ve seen …
