Overview September 6, 2021 update: A big thanks to Chris Lay and Daniel Zvinca who chimed in on a variety of issues, the most important of which is that the margin of error is very large with a low response count. I've added an option to hide marks where the number of responses is fewer [...]
Note: A big thank you to Daniel Zvinca who wrote a wonderful article advocating the “inside-out” approach that I recommend here. Overview My preferred way to visualize Likert-scale data in Tableau is a little cumbersome to create and I suspect some audiences won’t find it intuitive. But it’s worth taking the effort to build, and [...]
Overview There are times when an attendee at one of my workshops will share a chart or dashboard that is extremely complicated, to the point where I have a lot of trouble parsing it. I point out that I am a “professional chart looker-atter” and that if I am having trouble understanding the dashboard, I [...]
January 18, 2021 Some thoughts about critique in data visualization. Background For the past 18 months I’ve been working on a new book (more on this in a moment). Last September, I asked some colleagues to review selected chapters. I asked everybody to review the preface, which included this passage: My friend Jonathan Schwabish provided [...]
Overview I’ve written almost ten years’ worth of blog posts on visualizing survey data using Tableau (see https://www.datarevelations.com/visualizing-survey-data/). The good news is that dozens of how-to articles that are currently on my website are relevant and the techniques work. That said, Tableau made a HUGE change in how you can model data with the release [...]
September 30, 2020 Overview Tableau introduced Set Controls in 2020.2. Set Controls look like checkbox filters but instead of adding and removing data from a view they determine which elements are in a set and which are not. This feature can be very useful in visualizing survey data. But why not just use filters? [...]
Be careful what you amplify And some thoughts on color palettes / color ramps Background This tweet got a lot of attention recently (see https://twitter.com/andishehnouraee/status/1284237474831761408?s=20) Figure 1 -- Tweet suggesting that Georgia is trying to hide something. While I did not retweet it, I did blindly chime in that this looked like gross incompetence, [...]
In this Chart Chat we interview Len Kiefer, Deputy Chief Economist at Freddie Mac, explore problems with how the Georgia Department of Health visualizes Covid-19 data, and a discussion around our role as data visualization people to promote anti-racism. https://youtu.be/s-9Tix91TOI
In this Chart Chat we'll look at "Modern" dashboard design, how NBC reported unemployment in the US, The "seven circles of hell" chart and more. https://youtu.be/SILoC-FLF-E
Should you use dashboards to tell stories or to find stories? You can’t tell a good story if you don’t understand the data, and a good dashboard will help you understand the data, faster. My thanks to Adam McCann, Athan Mavrantonis, Andy Cotgreave, and Jeffrey Shaffer for reviewing and providing feedback. Why do we [...]
