VizWiz

Arsenal continues to stumble. Have they become too dependent on Van Persie? The stats don’t lie!

2012-01-16T10:49:00.001-05:00

Another weekend has passed by and another totally lackluster effort from my beloved Gunners. I knew they were in deep, deep trouble when they scored so early in the game and of course it was Robin Van Persie with another classy finish. This makes three games I can think of where Arsenal scored really early and couldn’t hold on. Surely there were other occasions as well.

Miraculously someone other than RVP scored later in the game (Theo Walcott), but when the final whistle blew and there were few chances created, I began to ponder what could happen if RVP gets hurt (some might say when instead of if). Arsenal’s dependency on RVP has been staggering this season.

I created the viz below based on club and squad stats from ESPN Soccernet for EPL games.

Here’s how I designed it and what I’ve observed:

Anything in red = Robin Van Persie
The dotted lines represent the averages over the 11 seasons
There’s no stat that measures effort, desire or heart. Thankfully, I guess, or the Gunners would be at the bottom of that table. They play so gutlessly at times!
The primary team stats are shown on the upper left for the last 11 EPL campaigns. This provides a nice little recipe for what you need to do to ensure you tumble right down the table and out of the Champions League qualification spots.

Fewer Goals For + More Goals Against = Lower Goal Differential = Fewer Points per Game = More Losses = Tumble Down the Table = No Champions League!

In other words, if you can’t score and you can’t defend, you won’t win. Seems pretty simple to me.
Arsenal is 21 games into the 2011-12 season and only one player has more than five goals. All other years had at least four, with the exception of 2003-04, but Thierry Henry had an exceptional season, scoring 30 goals or 41.1% of the teams’ goals.

Click on a year and you’ll be taken to another page that list the stats for they players that scored five or more goals that season.
I charted scoring rate (goals per game) vs. % of total team goals. This give us a way to measure a player’s total scoring importance to the team. Guess who the outlier is at the way upper-right. Hover over any point for more details.
The bottom three charts show the number of goals, % of team goals and scoring rate for the top scorer for each season. Again, hover over any bar for more details.

As I had thought, RVP is scoring a never before seen percentage of the team goals (45%). What more proof could Wenger need that he must bring in some reinforcements?

You might say that Arsenal depended heavily on TH14 during their glory years as well, but he had a much better supporting cast, as evidenced by the number of players with five or more goals. Plus Henry was nearly always fit, while RVP has proven to be very brittle over his tenure.

You can also look at GAA during those same years. Arsenal was truly a “team” back then, now…not so much!

What Arsenal needs to do to turn things around is pretty simple: score more goals and defend better. Personally, I don’t think the backline is as bad as it appears. I blame the outside midfielders for lack of effort and not tracking back to support the defense. If they’re going to be that lazy, they better at least score some goals.

What Arsenal needs is another consistent goal scoring threat. While I love Henry, I don’t think he’s the answer, especially since he’s only on loan. A long-term solution is needed. I fear without another formidable striker, the Gunners could easily finish outside the, gulp, top 8!

Information is Beautiful? Only if you like a totally useless mess of nothingness

2012-01-06T14:51:00.001-05:00

I have a problem with David McCandless of Information is Beautiful. From his own website he says:

A passion of mine is visualizing information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – all with the minimum of words.

I’m interested in how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath. Or, failing that, it can just look cool!

So let’s look at a couple of these statements in the context of his latest infographic.

Has David met any of his own criteria? Let’s check.

Minimum of words – No! All this infographic contains is words…horrible!
Facts – Maybe. If you consider a bunch of words facts, then I guess he meets this criteria.
Data – No, not even close
Ideas – No, nothing that I can see
Can help us understand – No, not for me
Reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories – No, absolutely not!
It can just look cool – Seriously?

To summarize, this is one of the worst infographics I’ve EVER seen. Shouldn’t we expect better from an “expert”? It’s impossible to gleam even the slightest bit of insight or data outside two things: nationality and that the album falls somewhere in the top 21.

How am I supposed to deduce the rank? The size? The width? The font? The location? I have no idea and no one else will likely know either. Throw me a bone and at least give me some type of instructions for making sense of this mess.

And another thing. Why the top 21? At first, I thought the list only went to 21, but Metacritic.com lists the top 30. And four albums are tied for 20th. The top 21 makes no sense whatsoever! Maybe David likes blackjack?

Let’s consider the definition of an infographic from Wikipedia (not the defining source, I know). I’ve bolded what I consider the key points.

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly.

Did David meet any of these criteria?

Graphic visual representation – No, he merely created a wordle.
Present complex information quickly and clearly – No. I can’t garner any insights quickly and clearly. Can you?

Ok, you can tell that I think his work is a totally useless mess. But how would I present the data to allow for quick and clear insights? I’d use Tableau.

My viz may not be an “infographic” in its purest sense since it doesn’t have all of the cute pictures, figurines, and unnecessary clutter, but I have met David’s criteria, the criteria for an infographic, plus much more.

Graphic visual representation – Check
Present complex information quickly and clearly – Check
Minimum of words – Check
Facts – Check
Data – Check
Ideas – Check
Can help us understand – Check
Reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories – Check
It can just look cool – Check

But Tableau let’s you go above and beyond.

Interact with the filters and highlighting
Change the Points Type
Filter and/or highlight nationalities
The data is ALWAYS ranked based on the selections you make

I’m sick and tired and tired and sick of seeing useless infographics like this one. I won’t keep my finger crossed that they’re going away anytime soon though.

Tableau Tip: Calculating the distance between two points

2012-01-05T09:48:00.001-05:00

I’m working on a project that requires me to calculate the distance between stores in order to plan resource allocation. Pretty cool stuff that could have a huge impact if it pans out.

Naturally I want to do this in Tableau, but I since I hadn’t done this before I turned to the Tableau Forum and found this great step-by-step tutorial.

TIP: For those of you that may be new to Tableau, I would highly recommend that you use the forum if you’re approaching something you’ve never done before. You’ll often find that someone has already done something similar and it’ll save you a lot of time versus re-inventing the work yourself.

Tableau has outlined this as a 22 step process, but they go through it in extreme detail. Note that your data source MUST have latitude and longitude available in this example. Here’s a slimmed down version for you (some of this is taken directly from the article):

Connect to your data source, select Single Table, then select Custom SQL
Create an inner join on a second instance of the table where the locations from the two instances are not equal (refer to the SQL script in the detailed instructions)
Click OK, then Extract the data. For me, I’m looking at 7271 stores, so the self join will result in about 50M records. Leverage the power of Tableau’s data extracts!
Double-click your latitude and longitude fields to start building the map. You may need to set the geographic role of the fields if you don’t have them named Latitude and Longitude.
Use the Great Circle Distance formula by creating a calculated field named Distance (or the name of your choice)

The formula is:
3959 * ACOS ( SIN(RADIANS([Lat])) * SIN(RADIANS([Lat2])) + COS(RADIANS([Lat])) * COS(RADIANS([Lat2])) * COS(RADIANS([Long2]) - RADIANS([Long])) ) NOTE: To calculate miles, use 3959 as the first number. For kilometers, use 6371 as the first number (thanks to Shawn Wallwork for the comment)
On the Marks card, in the list, select Line. This will create lines between all locations on the map. Start with only a couple locations if you have a huge dataset, otherwise it could take some time to draw all of the lines.

From this point, you can perform tons of different analysis. One example would be to drag Distance onto the Color shelf and the Label shelf on the Marks card to color code and label the distances between each point on the map.

Think about how you could blend other data source. For me, I might have home zip codes for employees in another data source and I want to see all stores within a certain radius of each employee. The possibilities are almost endless!

You can find a sample workbook for how all of this is done here. I know I’ll be using this technique over and over again.

Tableau Visual Guidebook - simple techniques for making every visualization useful and beautiful

2011-12-28T11:02:00.001-05:00

Interested in learning best some data viz best practices? Check out Tableau’s Visual Guidebook.

Heat Map: Manchester Derby Results Since 1907

2011-12-24T12:13:00.001-05:00

The Soccer by the Numbers blog continues to provide me great inspiration. After Manchester City destroyed Manchester United 6-1 on October 23rd (at ManU), they blogged about the results and provided a bit of statistical analysis. City has long been the “noisy neighbors” to United, but they now are doing their best to buy a title, rather than grow their own talent. Soccer by the Numbers posed this fundamental question:

We now know that the outcome of the match was truly unusual. But how unusual?

They created the table below, which is a frequency distribution of scored lines since 1907 of matches at Manchester United. To use the chart you simply identify the score line by going across City’s scores then down ManU’s scores. So the 6-1 scoreline has occurred 2.99% of the time since 1907. Clearly this was an unusual result.

But I think this table could be improved. I made these changes:

Changed the numbers to percentages and rounded to one decimal. Two decimals is unnecessary precision.
Removed most of the gridlines so that the lines separate the data from the categories
Formatted the results as a heat map. I chose a red-white two-color scheme since Red is ManU’s color. This makes the largest percentage of result very obvious. For example, you can now easily see, without having to scan across all of the data points, that 1-1 is the most common score line…boring result!
Formatted the totals as a second heat map. I chose a brown-white scheme for these. The totals show you the % of the total goals scored for each time. ManU has scored one or two goals 64.2% of the time while City has scored one or two goals 58.2% of the time.

Which format do you like best? Does one make the story easier to interpret than the other?

Using a non-zero-based axis: I don’t understand why “experts” can’t get it right

2011-12-22T12:24:00.001-05:00

Nielsen is widely regarded as providing exception analysis of consumer data. In fact, many of the best analysts I work with spent many years at Nielsen and they have been very interested in learning data visualization best practices because they now understand the benefits.

I agree that Nielsen’s insights are often fantastic, yet I don’t understand why they can’t present their analysis more appropriately. I guess my larger concern is that when a company with the influence on analysts like Nielsen has presents data visualization, even simple ones, so poorly, it make the abuse more and more pervasive. I’m seriously considering send a link to this post to the author of the presentations I’m about to review.

I received two annual reports the other day, both authored by a high-level employee who was supplemented by many other resources, so I can’t lay the blame on any one person, but more on Nielsen as a whole. Here is a summary of the charts they presented:

Presentation #1
Zero-based axis = 6
Missing or non-zero-based axis = 88
Pie chart with no color to differentiate the slices = 2
Charts well done = 6/96 = 6.3%

Presentation #2
Zero-based axis = 37
Missing or non-zero-based axis = 36
Smoothed line charts = 7
Charts well done = 37/80 = 46.3%

Hopefully this means someone told them presentation #1 had a lot of chart junk and they made an effort to improve presentation #2, but I doubt that’s actually the case. It’s easy to see that most of the charts were created in Excel, which will automatically set the axis to start somewhere other than zero if the numbers in the chart are large. I don’t know the specific business rules that Excel uses, but they should be changed.

Here is a representative example of the charts they created which did not have a zero-based axis. I’m holding out hope that this wasn’t done to intentionally deceive the reader, but to emphasize the subtle differences between the data points.

I recreated the chart as a dual-axis chart with the primary axis starting at zero and the secondary axis set to Excel’s default. Also note that I created a line chart since this is time-based series data, which typically means you’re wanting to see the overall pattern.

Clearly these imply a very different story.

Ok, we see what’s wrong, but how could Nielsen have presented the data more effectively? You have two primary options.

Dot plot

You can replace bar charts with dot plots so that the sequence over time is de-emphasized
Dot plots don’t require a zero-based scale
Dot plots force the reader to refer to the scale before comparing two values
Sizing and coloring the bubbles by change over prior year would speed up the reader’s analysis of variances between variables

Non-zero-based line chart with special alerts

This is the most effective method if you insist on NOT using a zero-based scale. Stephen Few sums it up best in Show Me the Numbers (page 169):

You should generally avoid starting your graph with a value greater than zero, but when you need to provide a close look at small differences between large variables, it is appropriate to do so. Make sure you alert your readers that the graph does not give an accurate visual representation of the values so that your readers can adjust their interpretation of the data accordingly.

Nielsen can learn a few lesson by reading some of the great data visualization books by Few and Tufte, or they could hire resources that know what they’re doing and allow those resources the freedom to make the best practices viral. The alternative isn’t good for any of us.

When you use a smoothed line chart, your data is not affected, it’s misrepresented!

2011-12-21T08:17:00.001-05:00

This past week, I was watching a presentation on Q3 performance and up pop a bunch of charts that were clearly created in Excel with smoothed lines. I hadn’t seen smoothed line charts in quite a while, so I was taken aback. I almost, but thankfully didn’t, stand up and call out the junk.

It was incredibly clear to me that the smoothed lines were distorting the data, not much, but distorting it nonetheless. And I have a problem with THAT!

Let’s first take a look at some examples to see how badly the data can be distorted. The first chart is obviously the smoothed lines. Nice and pretty, I agree. It makes me feel like I’m going up a chairlift then skiing down the slopes of Keystone, Colorado.

I added the gridlines, though I would never do this if I were presenting this for real, so that you can see where the points truly intersect. It should be abundantly clear now that the line is trying to connect points that don’t exist. Look between July & August 2009 or between August & September 2008. In both of these instances, and many more across the chart, the lines go beyond where they should in an attempt to make the chart nice and smooth.

If I were to look at this quickly, I might think that my sales increased from July to August 2009, but in fact, there was a slight decrease. In order for the line to connect smoothly to September 2009, the line has to go around August 2009. Think about all of the people that don’t used zero-based axes. Imagine how distorted their data could look.

Contrast the smoothed line chart to this standard line chart.

You now easily see that sales decreased from July to August 2009. It’d be tough to interpret anything from this chart between the months because the lines clearly connect month to month. The smoothed lines lead you to believe that there is more data being connected.

Now, let’s look at how the smoothed and straight lines look on the same chart. For illustrative purposes, we’re only looking at 2008. Now that dip after August really stands out.

Jon Peltier of the Peltier Tech Blog sums it up best in his post about the charts to choose and avoid in Excel 2010:

Smoothed lines are abused. If you are plotting measured data, the only valid connecting curve between points is a straight line (or a line which is fitted to a function that comes from a physical model of the data). A smoothed curve implies that the data goes places where it has not been measured. Smoothed lines without points are even worse, because the person trying to interpret the chart doesn’t even know what points on the smoothed curve belong there.

My advise? NEVER use smoothed lines. The ONLY possible outcome is misinterpretation.

Let me wrap up with what I find to be a bit of a funny line from Microsoft’s help for creating smoothed lines:

When you use this procedure to soften the jagged edges of a line chart, your data is not affected.

This is very true. Your data is not affected, it’s merely misrepresented. Semantics?

Is it possible to share 101.4% of Facebook? Chart of the Day thinks so!

2011-12-15T22:03:00.000-05:00

There's a bad stomach bug going around this part of town and I think I might know part of the reason why. Today, my good friends over at Chart of the Day published this pinwheel pie chart and I think the filling might be bad, because the pie sure looks ugly.

Here are some of the problems with this chart:

IT'S A PIE CHART!
Colors are re-used, or maybe they are so similar it's hard to tell they're different
The slices are not in order, making it even hard to look up the values (notice how Microsoft is listed ahead of Peter Thiel and some others)
The dollar amounts are based on their portion of $100B, yet they total up to $101,350,000,000.
Correspondingly, the percentages add up to 101.4%. How can you have more than 100% of a total?

To highlight the differences, I created the following charts with Tableau.

What I attempted to do here was show the Stated % Share (gray bar) from the pie chart compared to the "Restated % Share" (black bar). I calculated the Restated % Share with the following formula:

SUM([Stated $ Value])/TOTAL(SUM([Stated $ Value]))
NOTE: A special thank you to Marc Reuter (@tableaujedi) for enlightening the ATUG crowd today with some Jedi magic and for showing how to use the TOTAL function. I had never used it before (and didn't know about it either), but I find it totally awesome! It'll be so useful!

Basically, I'm taking the value stated on the pie chart and dividing it by the total value of the pie chart. This gives you the Restated % Share. The label is the difference between the Restated % Share and the Stated % Share.

The chart on the right represents the % variance number (as identified by the label on the left) multiplied by $100B (the estimated total value of Facebook).

If I were one of these shareholders, I'd be a bit concerned about the math. This isn't chump change! In the end, Chart of the Day may have made a $1.35B miscalculation. Oops!

Download the Tableau workbook here and you will see the original and restated data like this:

What does it take to survive in the English Premier League?

2011-12-14T06:30:00.001-05:00

If you love soccer, then it’s likely that you follow the EPL. My favorite team? ARSENAL! Did you see the incredible goal by RVP Saturday against Everton? You may never see better technique and now he’s only one goal behind Thierry Henry’s team record for goals in a calendar year. Please Lord, keep RVP healthy for a full season!

And if you love soccer and you love stats, then check out Soccer by the Numbers. Chris Anderson writes many quality posts and recently he blogged about points and relegation. I wanted to take Chris’ ideas a step farther. I needed a richer dataset than what Chris was able to provide, so I downloaded the final tables (i.e., standings) from the EPL back to the 2001-02 season from ESPNSoccernet. You can download the full dataset here.

I borrowed (or is it stole?) Steve Wexler’s technique for providing instructions (hover over the EPL logo to see what I mean). There’s lots of interactivity in the viz, so first check out the instructions, then start clicking around.

Answer this: How many teams have qualified for the Champions League with a negative goal differential? Who were they? What else can you tell me about the team(s)? Post your answer in the comments.

ATUG Webinar – Jedi Tricks and Brilliant Dashboarding (Thursday Dec 15, 1-4pm ET)

2011-12-13T13:56:00.001-05:00

While we prefer that you join us in person, this month we are offering the Atlanta Tableau User Group meeting as a webinar. Anyone is welcome to join.

RSVP (if you plan to attend in person) – http://www.tableausoftware.com/usergroups/atlanta-dec15-11

Please join 5 minutes early as we will start promptly at 1pm.

Agenda:

Jedi Tricks – Marc Rueter, Tableau Software
Hands-on Training: Tips & Tricks – Andy Kriebel, Coca-Cola

Authoring Brilliant Dashboards
Ten powerful tricks that will speed up your work

Information - January & February Meetings

-- This will be a hands on session --

Webinar Login Information
URL: http://bit.ly/drY3e5
Toll free: (877) 906-9811
Conference code: 2561415367

Join us at the next ATUG meeting – December 15th 1-4p @ Coca-Cola

2011-12-08T08:11:00.001-05:00

The next ATUG meeting will be December 15 @ 1PM ET

Where – Coca-Cola - 1 Coca Cola Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30313, Nicholson Room – Central Reception Building

Important – You must check-in with security and tell them you are there for the Atlanta Tableau User Group meeting.

Plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early!!

RSVP – http://www.tableausoftware.com/usergroups/atlanta-dec15-11

Agenda:

Jedi Tricks – Marc Rueter, Tableau Software
Hands-on Training: Tips & Tricks – Andy Kriebel, Coca-Cola
Information - January & February Meetings

-- This will be a hands on session - Bring your laptop and Tableau with you --

Sports Chart of the Day: When you want to emphasize rank, sort appropriately…please!

2011-12-07T08:54:00.001-05:00

Dear Sports Chart of the Day,

I’ve been patient. I’ve added comments (which never seem to get posted/approved). And I’m frustrated. I love your blog, but you really need to make some simple changes to your charts.

You often post charts like the one below (from this blog post). You often say things like you said in this post:

Here are the top 17 teams in the NFL based on points scored and points allowed and how many wins those teams would be expected to have based on those numbers (actual record in parentheses)

As a reader, it’s very clear that you are emphasizing top-to-bottom rank. Those of us that live in the western part of the world have learned to read left to right. You want us to look at the “top 17 teams”, yet the chart reads right to left. Please, please start sorting your ranking charts in the appropriate order, descending in this case. Trust me, this will improve your message.

Respectfully,
Andy

When income grows, who gains? Find out for yourself.

2011-12-05T21:50:00.001-05:00

Anyone who follow this blog know how much I despise pie charts, but there are times when I tip my cap to someone that does them well. As much as it pains me to say it, pie charts are not ALWAYS evil.

The viz below is a great example of how to use a pie chart well (from the State of Working America blog):

There are a maximum of four slices to this pie chart
You can very quickly see how dominant one slice is versus the others
The colors contrast well enough to not have to constantly refer to the legend

Click on the image to interact (you will be taken to the source site).

I guess what caught me most off-guard about this chart is the summary text when you choose 2002-2008. All income growth went to the top 10%. I had no idea! A great chart can indeed tell a great story, or better yet, let the reader discover the story for themselves.

Choosing a good chart type – A Cheat Sheet

2011-12-04T08:08:00.001-05:00

Charles Schaefer’s session at TCC11 “Understanding and Working with Chart Types” included this decent flow diagram for choosing a chart type. As the title says, it’s “A Thought-Starter”. In other words, use it as a way to get you going down the right path. This absolutely shouldn’t be taken as gospel; use your common sense. For example:

Don’t ever create 3D area charts. In fact, don’t ever create a 3D chart of ANY kind.
Never create a circular area chart
When created a stacked column chart don’t connecting the same colored bars with lines.

You can download the materials from Charles’ session here. Included are a JPG and PDF version of the flow chart.

The flowchart originates from a blog post back in 2006 on The Extreme Presentation Method blog. This blog, in turn, links to an interactive version of the chart chooser on Juice Analytics. Although Tableau does a lot of this thinking for you, definitely check out the interactive tool to get a feel for some best practices and download the sample excel workbooks to quickly recreate these charts yourself.

Tableau Tip: Adding dynamic Top X labels in 9 easy steps (add Bottom X for even more goodness)

2011-11-27T21:32:00.001-05:00

There a good chance you’ve run into this scenario before, maybe in a past life in Excel or with Tableau: You have a chart with a bunch of bars or columns or maybe a line chart, and you want the top 5 values labeled. Ideally, the chart would look something like this:

With Tableau, you can manually assign labels to these points, but wouldn’t it be better for the points that are labeled to change dynamically based on the data you have selected? There’s no easy way to do this in Tableau, but as always, there’s a workaround that’s quite simple once you implement it once or twice.

Be patient as you read your way through this; it might seem a bit complicated, but I’ll detail every step. Let’s get started.

1. Drag the Order Date dimension onto the Columns shelf, right-click on the pill and choose All Values (This changes the Order Date field from a Discrete dimension to Continuous; not a critical step, simply personal preference)

2. Drag the Sales measure onto the Rows shelf (I’ve filtered the Order Date to 2010 only, but that’s not necessary either)

3. Create a parameter, I named mine Top X, with the following properties:

NOTE: I could have chosen to always label the top 5 or top 10 values, but I want the consumers of the dashboard to be able to select the number of values they want to see labeled, thus the need for a parameter.

4. Right-click on the “Top X” parameter and choose “Create Calculated Field…” Name the field “Top X Label” and enter this formula:

IF INDEX()<=[Top X] THEN SUM([Sales]) END

I’ll explain the need to use the INDEX function in a bit.

5. Right-click on the “Top X” parameter and choose “Show Parameter Control”

6. Drag the Top X Label calculated field (from step 4) onto the Label shelf on the Marks card.

7. Here comes the trick: Right-click on the Top X Label measure and choose “Edit Table Calculation”

8. In the Table Calculation dialog box, change the Compute Using option to Advanced

9. In the Advanced window, change the Order Along settings to the Sum of Sales Descending. This will force the Top X Label field to index the values based on Sales from highest to lowest (thus the reason the calculated field compares to the INDEX() function).

That’s it! The top 5 points are now labeled. You’re chart should look like this:

You can use the Top X parameter to pick the number of values you want to label. Even if you filter the data, maybe to only show the East Region, the labels will still work properly.

But this is Tableau, so let’s take it a step farther. Maybe you need to label the top 5 and the bottom 5. There’s a neat little way to do this too.

1. Duplicate the Top X parameter and rename it Bottom Y and the show the Bottom Y parameter control

2. Duplicate the Top X Label calculated field, update it to reference the Bottom Y parameter and rename it to Bottom Y label:

IF INDEX()<=[Bottom Y] THEN SUM([Sales]) END

So now what? There’s no way to add a second label! True, but there IS a way to add a secondary axis.

3. Drag Sales onto the Rows shelf, right-click on it and choose Dual Axis

4. Remove “Measure Names” from the color shelf (we don’t need different colors since we’re using the same measure twice)

5. On the Marks card, click on the carrot on the upper-right of the card and choose Multiple Mark Types

6. Click the right arrow twice until you see “SUM(Sales) (2)”, then drag the Bottom Y Labels calculated field onto the Label shelf

7. Right-click on the Bottom Y Labels field, choose Edit Table Calculation, then repeat steps 8 & 9 above. The only difference is that the advanced table calculation should be in ascending order for the Bottom Y Labels:

You’re done! You now have an interactive chart that allows the user to pick the number of top and bottom values they want to see. Interact with it, download it and see how it works for yourself.

Finally, I would like to thank Joe Mako for his help in walking through this situation. He helped me with the formula and advanced table calculation for the Top X Label field.

The Best NFL Kick Returners Ever!

2011-11-18T16:32:00.001-05:00

Using Tableau is a never-ending journey of learning and today was no exception. It began with this chart from the Chart of the Day:

Overall, this chart is well executed, except I would have sorted the players in descending order. But I wanted to take it one step farther, so I downloaded the data from pro-football-reference.com and got to work in Tableau. I wanted to be able to compare:

Not only the combined kick returns, but also the top punt returners and kickoff returners separately. I wanted to know which players were the best in each category.
Players that played for one team versus more than one team
A player’s kick return ability compare to his punt return ability

Finally, I wanted to be able to filter each chart by the Top X Players for that chart. This is where parameters come in handy.

I started this post by saying I learned a few things. I learned to:

Make the user experience easier by creating a list of instructions like Steve Wexler at DataRevelations.com always does. Hover over the NFL logo to see the instructions for this viz.
Filter by a Top X parameter when there’s more than one item on the color shelf (like on the Total TDs chart). Check out this discussion on the Tableau forum for an explanation (thanks to Joe Mako for the link and help making it work with a scatter plot).

To answer the question in the title of the viz, Devon Hester is very dangerous…a clear outlier, he’s a player that is “numerically distant” from the rest of the players.

Telling a Good Story: Effective presentation of analytical results

2011-11-10T12:43:00.002-05:00

Another great TDWI webinar today: “Effective presentation of analytical results” by Jonathan Koomey. Much of the content will be review for those that have read books by Edward Tufte and Stephen Few (many of the examples used were taken from Show Me the Numbers), but it’s always good to hear someone else’s take on effective presentations. My key takeaways:

Know your audience - Think about what your audience cares about, and express your results in those terms
Don’t forget the decision maker
Use structured storytelling to present the key results
Document your work (results & methodology) so that others can recreate it
Break up graphs and tables into two categories
– Those that give you insights
– Those that help you tell your story to others
Charts and figures must focus on the data
Improving poor visualizations is a great way to teach best practices
– Even simple changes can make a huge difference in communication
My favorite quote: “Data are dull only when chosen poorly and presented badly”

Download the presentation here or read it below.

UPDATE (11/11/2011): The webinar video is now available for replay. Watch it here.

Ammunition: Driving Smart Decisions at Your Organization

2011-11-08T14:10:00.001-05:00

Lyndsay Wise of Wise Analytics and Francois Ajenstat of Tableau hosted a terrific webinar today about self-service BI. I especially appreciated the discussion about IT’s role as an enabling and support organization, rather than bureaucratic and controlling.

There are lots of battle wounds from sparring with IT about BI and if you are in an organization where it’s challenging to get IT support for self-service BI, rather than resistance, then this might be the ammunition you need.

You can download the presentation here or read it below.

UPDATE (11/11/2011): The webinar video is now available for replay. Watch it here.

Batch Geocoding: Convert addresses or locations into latitude-longitude coordinate pairs

2011-11-08T09:55:00.001-05:00

I’ve been adding customers to the Penetration Reporting I presented at TCC11 (word is spreading and people love it!), but there are often records in our internal systems that do not match up with the master address list for our customers from Nielsen Spectra.

One of the great features of Tableau is data blending and this project is a perfect example of how you might use it. I have my sales and internal customer list in SQL server, but the location information, including latitude/longitude are in an Excel file. Tableau allows me to integrate these data sources via a key field, store number in this case.

As I referred to earlier, this works perfectly for ~95% of the records, but there are ALWAYS stores in our internal system that do not exist in Spectra. Here’s a sample of missing stores:

To prepare the data to address this problem I take the following steps:

Concatenate the address fields together in Excel with the formula CONCATENATE(TRIM(Address)," ,",TRIM(City),",",TRIM(State)," ",TRIM(Zip))
Copy all of the rows in the new “Full Address” column

Now the fun and magical part begins. A colleague led me to the tool Batch Geocoding, which basically takes text strings and returns the latitude/longitude coordinates. Here’s how it works:

In the “Input” box, paste the data you copied from Excel above
Choose your output format and click the “geocode” button
Watch the magic as the tool populates the Output box.
Copy all records from the Output box and paste into Notepad
Save the Notepad file in txt format
Open the TXT file in Excel
Copy the records from the TXT file and append to the end of the master customer list from Spectra

That’s it! So simple! I have no idea how it works, but it does. Of course, it’s not going to be 100% accurate, because the addresses may not exist, but it does tell you how well it was able to match the records.

Definitely keep this link in your toolkit. I’ve also added a link on the right side of this blog under “Useful Data Sources”.

Makeover of a Makeover – Waterfall vs. Side-by-side Bar Chart

2011-11-07T10:48:00.001-05:00

One of the great things about the data viz world is that people are always willing to listen, learn and share. Cole Nussbaumer over at storytelling with data (a great blog you should follow) recently conducted a visual makeover on some horrible charts submitted during a class she was teaching. and she was willing to share her data with me so that I could make my own viz. Where else do you experience such camaraderie?

The improvements she recommends are fantastic, but I recommended one improvement to this chart she created:

Typically when I see side-by-side bar charts I’m looking to compare the bars that are next to each other. However, in this case, the bars are not necessarily related; they are simply a list of expenses and income next to each other. I recommended she create a waterfall chart like this one done with Tableau:

To me, a waterfall chart communicates the expenses vs. income story of this data more effectively

The bar sizes make comparisons easy. It’s clear that Programs are the largest expense and Grants are the largest income.
You can easily see the total variance without having to do the math in your head.
Other Expenses are much larger than Other Income. I wonder what’s included in those expenses. Looks like an area for investigation.
This group should probably focus a bit more on Sponsorships so that they’re not so dependent on Grants.

I could have included labels for all of the bars, but I wanted to show the patterns and relative sizes without the numbers being a distraction.

You can download the original Excel data here and/or the Tableau workbook here.

P.S. I chose red/green bars for two reasons: (1) most people understand red as negative and green as positive when reading financial figures and (2) to annoy my friend Steve Wexler of the Data Revelations blog (another you should follow), who hates this color scheme more than anyone I know.

Download the TCC11 Session Materials

2011-11-04T07:58:00.001-04:00

TCC11 has passed, but everyone in attendance is anxious to get their hands on all of the great presentations, workbooks, etc. For those of you not able to go, now I’m making them available to you as well. Enjoy!

Session Materials
We packed the 2011 schedule with so many great sessions and learning opportunities that it may have been difficult to choose which session to attend. Visit our conference content page to watch the video recordings and download session materials. We will be adding more materials as they become available.

Save the Dates for our 2012 Tableau Customer Conference
European Customer Conference – April 2-4, 2012: W Hotel, Barcelona, Spain – apply to speak
North American Customer Conference – November 5-8, 2012: Hilton Bayfront, San Diego, CA

Join us at the November Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up!

2011-11-03T21:21:00.001-04:00

The next ATUG meeting will be November 17 @ 1PM ET

Who - All ATUG members and guests
What – The November in person hands on meeting
Where – Coca-Cola - 2 Coca Cola Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30313, USA-G

Important – You must check-in with security and tell them you are there for the Atlanta Tableau User Group meeting. They will then call me to come get you. I will have people in the lobby to help usher you to the room.

Plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early

RSVP – http://www.tableausoftware.com/usergroups/atlanta-nov17-11

Agenda:

1. Tableau Customer Conference Presentation – The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making (Andy Kriebel, Coca-Cola)

2. Training – Iron Viz Challenge: Create a beautiful viz with unfamiliar data in less than 30 minutes (David Newman, CSE Inc.)

3. Open forum –

Tableau Customer Conference feedback, highlights, etc.
December meeting – location, time, agenda

-- This will be a hands on session - Bring your laptop and Tableau with you --

Tableau is about to knock your socks off again – A sneak peek at Tableau 7 features

2011-11-03T08:55:00.001-04:00

Now that TCC11 has ended, the cat is out of the bag. Tableau 7 is coming, and coming soon; it should be available for download around the beginning of the year. Christian Chabot demoed many of the new features (but I’m sure not all) of Tableau 7 Desktop and Tableau 7 Server.

Some of my favorite new features (which we got to play with at TCC11) include:

Filled maps!! (though they don’t go down to the zip code level)
Wrapped maps
Using parameters in filters, bins, reference lines/bands
Improved statistics
Lots of improvements to make the most prominent features more easily accessible

But there is one sad feature: the end of Null Island (this is the place where invalid geographic data are placed).

Here is what’s coming in Tableau Desktop:

Interested in learning what's coming in Tableau 7 Server? Click here.

TCC11 session feedback positive, except for the guy drinking the Pepsi

2011-10-28T16:58:00.001-04:00

Wednesday I received the feedback from my session/presentation at the 4th Tableau Customer Conference. I had a blast presenting my case studies (The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making) and the interaction from the audience made it a wonderful experience. I presented three case studies:

Collaborating for Value – An era of winning (this was an interactive analysis of retail prices by store by price point)
Customer Segmentation – Planning for growth and identifying opportunities
Penetration & Voids – Growing the business by finding the gaps

As has been my experience with presenting this same material both internally to our customer teams and externally to our buyers, the audience was able to gleam insights by “seeing” the data. It’s a pretty cool experience when the data and the tool tell the story without you having to say a word. Tableau makes it oh so easy.

What surprised me most about many of the customer presentations I attended was the lack of using Tableau live to show off their work. Maybe my material lends itself more to that type of interactivity, but I would highly encourage anyone presenting findings from Tableau to use the tool live; you’ll get immediate feedback and you’ll be able to answer questions on the fly.

So how’d I do? First up is a chart from Tableau that ranks all of the presentations, not only the customer presentations. I’m the circle that the red line points to. According to Tableau, this placed me in the top 3 of the customer presentations.

But how about the feedback on my presentation? The response was overwhelmingly positive. I always get anxious waiting for the feedback!

I asked someone that was drinking a Pepsi to leave, jokingly of course, but I wonder if he gave me the “poor” ranking. I tend to be a bit too directly and sarcastic and sometimes it’s taken the wrong way. Or maybe it was someone that didn’t win the t-shirt I gave away.

Anyway, thanks to all of you that attended my session. It was an awesome dialogue with the 75+ of you. Hopefully we’ll catch up again in Europe.

Gratefully,

Andy

Sex, Politics, Disasters and Cheating - What I’ve learned in 800 days of the VizWiz blog

2011-10-22T07:41:00.001-04:00

It’s hard to believe that I started this blog on August 13, 2009, 800 days ago (yes, I know my first post wasn’t until Aug 17). The time has absolutely flow by and I’ve learned so much.

For example, I’ve never shaded an axis in lieu of a color legend until today. Heck, I never even thought about until I saw a bunch of vizzes on Tableau Public that were using this style. I’ve always included the color legends, but it’s really not necessary on a dual-axis chart like this with only two colors. You might even call the use of a color legend chart junk in this case.

From what this viz tells me, I should stick to some specific topics if I want to drive traffic:

Sex
Politics
Cheating
Disasters

Does that surprise you? It doesn’t surprise me since those are topics that generally dominate the news.

One final stat of interest: 90% of the total traffic to my blog has occurred since I posted this viz as part of the Flowing Data contest about STDs. Nathan must be a pretty popular dude.

Tableau Whitepaper: 5 Best Practices for Creating Effective Dashboards

2011-10-21T12:30:00.002-04:00

The latest Dashboard Insight contains a whitepaper written by Tableau that walks you through a five-step process for creating effective dashboards. Basically, it’s a recipe card. I’d encourage you to read it below or here.

The whitepaper below is pretty much identical to a whitepaper Tableau wrote in 2008, except it looks cleaner and shows some of the features added in Tableau 6.

Introducing the #TCC11 Excitometer

2011-10-15T00:46:00.001-04:00

What’s an Excitometer? It’s a handy little column chart that measures your level of excitement for all Tableau Customer Conferences. It averages all of your results and provides you some feedback if you need a pat on the back or a kick on the tail.

Fill it out for yourself. Maybe the Excitometer has a message for you.

Practicing what I preach – A self-critique

2011-10-14T13:03:00.001-04:00

Back in August I critiqued and improved a viz created with Many Eyes. Some of my comments included:

The map incorporates both color and size, which are set based on the measures picked on the right.
Brushing a State(s) in any chart highlights the State(s) on the other charts.
Hovering over a bubble or bar reveals the details of the stats chosen. The stats update based on the selections made.
I’m able to use the color scale consistently through all of the charts.

Now that I have learned how to use simple state polygons in Tableau, I realized that what I previously created was unnecessarily complex. Here’s take 2:

I made a few easy to implement improvements:

States are now polygons instead of bubbles
The option to choose a size has been removed as it no longer would add any value
The table on the right is now shows only the top and bottom 10 (I learned how to do this today via a discussion on the Tableau Forum that, not surprisingly, included a sample workbook for the solution from Joe Mako)

I also didn’t lose this set of functionality:

Brushing a State(s) in any chart highlights the State(s) on the other charts.
Hovering over a state or bar reveals the details of the stats chosen. The stats update based on the selections made.
The color scale is consistent through all of the charts.

In the end, I’ve reduced the viz from four charts to two and made it much easier to interpret the results.

See, I can practice what I preach and I love learning something new everyday.

Global Consumers Go Bubble Popping

2011-10-13T21:33:00.001-04:00

Nielsen is at it again. Just when I thought they were making strides in the right direction, they bring me back to reality. As with most Nielsen articles, this one is well written with lots of facts that are explained in an easy to understand manner (kudos to them for writing well). There’s even a nice bar chart that ranks survey responses. But then, they throw this junk in there:

Is it just me, or is this screaming out for another bar chart? Maybe they’re afraid they’ll bore their audience with another bar chart, so they throw in an unnecessary ranked bubble chart to gain your attention. Are they THAT desperate? Why not represent it like the bar chart below?

Or better yet, show the data itself. It tells the same story, but only simpler and you don’t have to try to infer any additional meaning from the size of the bubbles.

My faith and resolve are not shaken though. Eventually they’ll get annoyed by my emails and write me back.

Tableau Customer Conference Pocket Agenda (and the can't miss sessions)

2011-10-13T17:08:00.001-04:00

Four days! Need I say more! I can’t wait. Tableau sent out the pocket agenda below so that we attendees can prepare ahead of time.

Here are my plans for the breakout sessions (my intent is to attend those that I think will give me the most ideas to take back to work):

Tuesday	9:45-10:45	Tableau Inside…Intel	Brahms 4
	11:00-12:00	Revenue Management @ American Airlines	Brahms 4
	3:15-4:15	The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making (I better attend this one since I’m the presenter)	Brahms 3
	4:30-5:30	How to Start a User Group (I’ll be one of the hosts for this session)	Mozart

Wednesday	9:45-10:45	Which Way Business Intelligence?	Brahms 1-2
	11:00-12:00	Best Practices for BI Success	Brahms 1-2
	3:15-4:15	Tableau & Statistical Analysis	Puccini
	4:30-5:30	Tips & Tricks from the Wild	Brahms 3

Thursday	9:45-10:45	Your Brain & You	Brahms 1-2
	11:00-12:00	Making the Business Case for Analytics	Brahms 1-2

I hope to see you there. Please find me and say hi.

Alternatively, download the pocket guide here.

Available for Download: Tableau Certification Study Guide

2011-10-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

It's almost here...the 2011 Tableau Customer Conference. If you're anything like me, the anticipation is making you positively giddy!

I'm taking the Tableau Desktop certification test during the conference and the study materials were just released. I've embedded them below. It's a great guide, even if you're not taking the test.

Alternatively, download the study guide here.

Is your work hard or challenging? Don’t ever say hard (it’s a weasel word)!

2011-09-27T11:49:00.001-04:00

Ted Cuzzillo over at datadoodle posted an intriguing cliche on his latest blog post. Ted said “Simple is hard.”

I immediately recalled a conversation we’ve had with our kids and their Target teachers (Target is the gifted program in Georgia). In the Target classrooms, the students are not permitted to say something is “hard”; they say that it’s “challenging”. This struck me as a bit revolutionary in the use of those two words. Many of use them interchangeably, but should we?

Definitions (limited to those that pertain to this conversation):

hard
1. difficult to do or accomplish; fatiguing; troublesome: a hard task.
2. difficult to deal with, manage, control, overcome, or understand: a hard problem.

challenging
1. offering a challenge; testing one's ability, endurance, etc: a challenging course; a challenging game.
2. stimulating, interesting, and thought-provoking: a challenging suggestion.
3. provocative; intriguing: a challenging smile.

Read them again. I find the subtle differences fascinating. My “work” is incredibly challenging, but is it hard? I love that I get to test my abilities everyday. My work is stimulating, thought-provoking and intriguing. Why would I ever say it’s hard? Maybe that’s why I don’t see my work as “work”. It’s fun and it’s CHALLENGING. The challenge is what makes it fun.

At our house we have a couple of weasel words: hard and try. We do our best to never use these two words because, in our opinion, they’re cop out words.

Think about this when you say something is hard. Are you convincing yourself that the task can’t be done?

When you say you’ll try to do something, do you really mean it? How about saying “I’ll do my best”?

Change your vocabulary and see how it impacts your performance.

State Polygons in Tableau – A must have, useful, simple template

2011-09-16T10:46:00.001-04:00

I recently read a post by Albatrosa Analytics that included a map of the continental US with the states shaded. I’ve see many people do this in the past, but the data set created by all of the points was HUGE. Now with the polygons feature of Tableau you can easily create a shaded map.

In the viz below, I’ve used the data blending feature to combine the polygons with data by state. I can see so many uses for this.

Download the data for creating the polygons here and the sample state data here.

Join us at the September Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up

2011-09-02T09:46:00.001-04:00

Please join Mischa Uppelschoten of UPS and Dan Murray of Interworks as they host the Atlanta Tableau User Group on Wednesday, September 21 from 2:00 - 4:00 pm at UPS.

This event is a time to share, listen, network and discuss experiences and opportunities with other Tableau users.

Information:

Wednesday, September 21 from 2:00 - 4:00 pm
UPS, 55 Glenlake Parkway NE, Atlanta, GA 30328

Agenda:

Introductions / Networking
Webinar – Tableau @ Oxford University: A Classic Tale of “Land & Expand” – Andy Cotgreave, Tableau Software
Break / Networking
Exploratory Vitas: Ways to Become Acquainted with a Data Set for the First Time – Hands-on activity – Dan Murray, Interworks
November Meeting Discussion

Bring your laptop equipped with Tableau because this will be a hands-on session.

Overcoming resistance & building champions - Albert Birck, Maersk Line - as presented at ATUG

2011-08-29T10:19:00.006-04:00

The August Atlanta Tableau User Group meet-up featured Albert Birck from Maersk Line as a special guest speaker, all the way from Europe. Albert gave a wonderful, humorous presentation that focus on:

Overcoming Resistance in BI Projects

Outgunned and outnumbered
Feeling like an outlaw
No funds, only problems to solve
Locked-in

And how 'guerilla-analytics' can help you deal with it

If you have a few minutes please participate in Albert's Performance Management survey done together with Henley Business School. The results will be available free of charge and he expects it to be very useful also for how you use business analytics to support performance management projects:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/perf_mgmt

Thank you, Albert, for sharing your insights and time with us.

Tableau Tip: 7 easy steps to create a combination chart with overlapping bars & a line

2011-08-26T23:12:00.001-04:00

As a follow up to my previous post, which showed how a dual-axis chart looks in Tableau (compared to the Excel version I wrote about in the post previous to my previous post), I was asked by someone named Anonymous (I can never seem to identify him/her) to create similar instructions for building the dual-axis overlapping bar and line chart in Tableau.

Here are the steps I used to produce the chart (there are a billions ways to skin the cat, so take it for what it is):

Step 1: Place the Week dimension on the Columns shelf and the Measure Values measure on the Rows shelf

Step 2: Drag the Number of Records pill off of the Measure Values shelf to remove it

Step 3: Drag the Units pill from the Measure Values shelf to the right edge of the chart (i.e., the secondary axis). You know you’re on the secondary axis when you see the dashed vertical line

You’re entire canvas should now look like this:

Step 4: Right-click on the Units pill, choose Mark Type => Line

You’re viz should now look like this:

Step 5: Right-click on the Measure Values pill, choose Mark Type => Bar

STOP! Pop the top off that next bottle of Blue Moon. Double-check your work. You’re viz should now look like this. If not, click the Undo button until you get back to a good spot.

Step 6: Drag the Measure Names dimension onto the Size shelf

Step 7: At this point, the bars are stacked. So on the Analysis menu, choose Stacked Marks => Off

That’s it! You’re done! There’s some formatting you could do like adjusting the width of the bars, changing the number format on the axes, etc., but the essence of the chart is now complete. Seven simple steps in 15 seconds (I wrote 90 seconds in my last post, but I timed myself this time).

Tableau: Dual axis chart with overlapping bars and a line

2011-08-26T11:09:00.001-04:00

What took me a couple hours to figure out in Excel (see previous blog post) just took me about 90 seconds to create in Tableau (though I do have 4+ years experience with Tableau).

Notice that the bars are properly scaled now too. The gray bar now longer is at $150 not $190 like it looked like in Excel. Bottom line, use Tableau.

Excel: How to create a dual axis chart with overlapping bars and a line

2011-08-26T10:31:00.001-04:00

I came across a challenge last week while working on a project. I needed to create a dual-axis chart, with two bars on the primary axis and a line on the secondary axis. Tableau makes this task incredibly easy, but I needed to do this in Excel. Well, I really didn’t HAVE to create the chart in Excel, but others needed to be able to update the chart and they, gasp, don’t have a Tableau license.

It’s easy enough to create a dual-axis chart in Excel, if you want the bars side by side. However, I needed overlapping bars. There’s no standard chart design within Excel to accommodate this, which meant I had to come up with a workaround. I perused the internet and didn’t find anyone else that had done this (I’m sure people have done it, but haven’t shared their work), so I wanted to share it with anyone that may need to do it in the future.

A sample Excel workbook can be found here (if your corporate network blocks Dropbox, send me an email and I’ll forward it to you).

The final product looks like this:

Steps to reproduce:

Highlight your data, insert a 2-D clustered column chart
Change the bar and line colors if desired
Right-click on one of the bars that you want on the secondary axis and choose Format Data Series
Change the Plot Series On option to Secondary Axis
With the bars on the secondary axis still highlighted, from the Chart Tools Design menu, change the Chart Type to a line
Right-click on one of the bars that are on the primary axis and choose Format Data Series
Change the Series Overlap to 100%
The two bars on the primary axis now completely overlap each other. You’re almost done!
Remove the gridlines (important…I’ll explain in a bit) and add the axis labels (I hate it when people create dual-axis charts in Excel and don’t add the axis labels!)
Give the bars the “overlap” look (these are the most important steps to give the bars the proper) by right-clicking on the gray bar (i.e., the bar that’s in the first column of the table) and choosing Format Data Series
Choose the Border Color option, select Solid Line and set the color to the same color as the bar (in my case, light gray)
Choose the Border Styles option, change the Width to 10pt (or whatever floats your boat) and change the Cap type to Flat and the Join type to Miter
That’s it! You’ve create a dual-axis chart in Excel with overlapping bars on the primary axis and a line on the secondary axis.

Now wait, I mentioned earlier that you should delete the gridlines. This is critical because we’ve changed the height of the bar in the back by adding the border. This leaves you with a couple of options:

Make the border of the bar in the back really thin, but this makes it challenging to see the overlap
Change the data to account for the thickness, but it’s kinda scary to me to alter the data because if you mouse over the point you see the original data
Leave the bars thick so that you can clearly see the overlap

I would go with option 3 because the naked eye won’t be able to discern the difference to the bar height anyway. The purpose of the chart, after all, is to give the overall trends and comparisons anyway, not focus on the original data.

If that “change” in the bar size really bothers you, then simply add the data table under the chart:

Don’t we all love challenges! I know I do.

TCC2011 – The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making (You may know the speaker)

2011-08-26T07:54:00.001-04:00

At the Tuesday morning breakout sessions (11AM – 12PM) at this year’s Tableau Customer Conference, be sure to check out “The Holy Grail of Strategic Decision Making”. For the second time in four conferences, I have been given the honor of being a customer speaker. I’d love it if we packed the house; I think you’ll come away entertained and having learned something.

Summary:

Four-years of Tableau experience led me to a major turning point in my career, one that involved working with "buyers" for our products. These major customers expect insights and analysis from us, but they never experienced the "unbiased" stories that I've been able to tell with Tableau.
This session will dive into new ways to work with customers and partners to identify opportunities that have been almost nearly impossible to detect without Tableau. The impact will lead you to think about the data you have within your own organization as well as third-party information to drive insight into your business that will change the way you think about making decisions.

I look forward to meeting many of you this year and I hope to see you at my breakout session.

Business Objects Evaluation circa 2008

2011-08-23T15:09:00.011-04:00

Note to readers:
I've been asked by many people over the last couple of years to publish my evaluation of Business Objects back in 2008. While SAP Business Objects has changed quite a bit since then and addressed some of the issues I raised, many of the critiques, evaluations and recommendations remain.

Enjoy!
Andy

Chartbeat – A cute but deficient web traffic dashboard

2011-08-19T11:05:00.001-04:00

While reading an article on Sports Chart of the Day, a cute little gauge on the right sidebar titled “The Engage-O-Meter” caught my eye. Naturally I clicked on it (which must mean they did something correct with its placement). The gauge directs you to a chartbeat.com dashboard that’s capturing real-time site traffic for businessinsider.com.

The amount of information on the page is impressive, overwhelming and disorganized. Two pieces of the dashboard confused my straight away (and they’re the only two sections of the dashboard you see when the screen first appears because there’s so much spaced used at the top for basically nothing).

Let’s dissect these two charts/graphs.

What mistakes have been made?

It takes up way too much space on the dashboard. There’s a ton of white space in this one chart alone.
The active visits number could be represented as just that, a number. The gauge isn’t necessary and doesn’t add any value.
The new & returning users are difficult to interpret. Why do the numbers need to be so precise? Would a relative measure, like % of total, be more appropriate?

I would present this information in a table. Ultimately we’re simply “looking up” the data, which lends well to a table. We’re not attempting to determine any trends, which is what charts do well.

Active Visits
Now	8,342
30-day Min	3
30-day Max	17,971

Visitor Composition
New	20%
Returning	80%

Onto the second chart.

What could be improved? What’s confusing?

This “Top Pages” section, is merely a list of the top pages and their respective number of active visits. Why not a simple list?
Do the circles add any value? To me they don’t. Each circle represents 10 active users, but the layout of the circles doesn’t make sense. If you count across, there are 19 columns. Why not 20? That’d at least make it easier to estimate the totals.
If you multiply the number of circles by 10 in each section, you don’t get the same total as represented by the number itself.
I believe, but can’t substantiate, that they’re making this similar to a Merimekko chart, which is a chart that encodes two variables: one for height and one for width. I don’t see why this would be necessary at all.

Maybe representing all of the data as a bar chart would be better.

In the end, with these two simple changes, I’ve been able to save a ton of space. The rest of their dashboard could be reworked as well and maybe it’d all fit into one nice window.

ATUG Webinar Today 1pm ET - Albert Birck (Maersk Line): Overcoming Resistance in BI Projects

2011-08-18T08:45:00.001-04:00

Join ATUG today at 1pm ET as special guest Albert Birck from Maersk Line joins us all the way from Europe to present his talk from the European Tableau Customer Conference:

Overcoming Resistance in BI Projects

Outgunned and outnumbered

Feeling like an outlaw

No funds, only problems to solve
Locked-in

And how 'guerilla-analytics' can help you deal with it

-------------------------------------------------------
To join this meeting (Now from mobile devices!)
-------------------------------------------------------

Go to https://nsc.webex.com/nsc/j.php?J=715230391
If requested, enter your name and email address

If a password is required, enter the meeting password: stealth

Click "Join"
Follow the instructions that appear on your screen.

Meeting Number: 715 230 391
Meeting Password: stealth

-------------------------------------------------------
Audio conference information
-------------------------------------------------------

USA: 1-866-672-6771
International: +44 20 7198 1751
User code: 02 56 577#

Fertility Exposed – Tableau vs. Many Eyes

2011-08-12T21:47:00.003-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve checked out Many Eyes, but this one below has been on my list to review for a while now. Click around to get a flavor for their presentation.

I’ve seen lots of vizzes done well on Many Eyes. The viz above has many good qualities:

The mouse-over feature is smooth and quick. I like the format of the text and how the state becomes outlined.
You can easily switch between metrics with the drop-down box.
You can show one, two or all maps at the same time to make comparisons more easily.
Initially, when you show more than one map, the color scales are unique to each map, but there is a simple checkbox that aligns the scales.
The brushing/highlighting feature works well when you show more than one map, which makes comparisons between individual states even easier to make.
I like the choropleth maps, a feature we’re all still waiting for in Tableau.
Switching from choropleth maps to States represented as bubbles can be accomplished in one click. This would be another great feature to add to Tableau once/if they add choropleth maps.
I particularly like how you can crop Alaska and Hawaii to make the overall map bigger without sacrificing those States. It’s a bit annoying that you can’t do this directly in Tableau, however, you can work around it in a dashboard.

However, there are some improvements that I would make (and attempted to below):

There’s not enough variance in the colors, making small variances between States harder to distinguish.
While the choropleth maps are nice, they should be used with caution because the larger States can easily stand out simply due to their size (e.g., Texas)
For some reason, most of the States are labeled, but not all of them. Not sure why that is especially considering the unlabeled States in the Southeast.
Many Eyes limits you to one view (i.e., a map or a line chart, but not both). In other words, you can’t create a dashboard.
If you view the map as bubbles, you can’t add another dimension or measure as a color.
The default bubbles sizes make variances between States indistinguishable. There’s a scale on the lower-left, but it doesn’t automatically adjust to the data in the view. The only measure that is well represented by the size is the number of births.

Here’s my take, using Tableau:

With Tableau I’ve been able to make many of the improvements recommended as well as add vizzes that allow for quick insights:

The map incorporates both color and size, which are set based on the measures picked on the right.
Those same parameters update the other three charts.
Brushing a State(s) in any chart highlights the State(s) on the other charts.
Hovering over a bubble or bar reveals the details of the stats chosen. The stats update based on the selections made.
You can easily see that Utah has a small population, but the highest fertility rate. Maybe it’s their religion?
I’m able to use the color scale consistently through all of the charts.

I made this viz with Tableau 6.1, which now allows hyperlinks on images. This certainly simplifies directing people to your social networks and data sources.

How would you improve my viz? Please share.

Join us at the August Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up!

2011-08-12T16:32:00.001-04:00

Click here to register

Join us at the Atlanta User Group August 18th from 1-4pm @ Norfolk Southern.

Agenda:

Introductions & Networking
Overcoming Resistance in BI Projects - Albert Birck, Maersk Line
Break / Networking
Team Activity
September Meeting Discussion (any volunteers to host?)

This will be a hands-on meeting so please bring your laptop with Tableau.

Who should attend? Tableau User groups are open to any Tableau customers and enthusiasts.

Tableau Tip: Local vs. Global Filters on a Dashboard

2011-08-02T18:59:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I chimed in on a discussion on Tableau’s forum regarding a concern/problem/feature request that a user wanted to see in Tableau. Here’s a synopsis of the discussion:

Having to create duplicate data sources & bookmarks is burdensome, inefficient, and painful.
Global Filters needs this functionality soon:

Moveable Quick Filters – moving on any worksheets moves the global quick filter on all worksheets
Ability to select or unselect multiple global quick filters at the same time
Ability to turn On or Off across all worksheets with one button toggle
Ability to make local to only specific worksheet(s), while leaving the filter for all the other worksheets
Dashboard filters, filters that only effect sheets on the local/current dashboard

I’ve run into this myself several times and developed a bit of a workaround that I now use quite often. In essence, instead of using a global filter (which impacts all sheets including and beyond the current dashboard), I create additional worksheets, but make them look like a quick filter. Here’s an example:

Notice the three tables on the right. These are actually worksheets. I’ve created actions based on what you click in these three tables. This method works for creating a filter that’s local to the dashboard. It doesn’t completely address the issue raised, but it comes pretty close.

ATUG Contest Winner - E-Con Case Study

2011-07-30T10:09:00.001-04:00

Paul Lisborg of Newnan Utilities, was announced the winner of the ATUG (Facebook, LinkedIn) viz challenge at the July meet-up. Paul has been a very active member of ATUG since the beginning. In fact, I don’t believe he’s missed a single meet-up.

Here’s a screen shot of Paul’s interactive viz. The data source is too large to upload to Tableau Public; click on the image below to download the workbook.

For his efforts, Paul was awarded a pretty cool water bottle and a t-shirt. Best of all, Paul won the iPad2 given away by Tableau at the 6.1 launch party. It was only fitting that Paul won.

Join us at the July Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up & Viz Contest – Hosted by Tableau

2011-07-14T12:08:00.001-04:00

Tableau 6.1: See Your Data Like Never Before

Click here to register

Tableau’s gone mobile and is making stops at user groups across the country to give customers a first-hand look at what's coming in Tableau 6.1.

Join us at the Atlanta User Group as we raffle off an iPad in 6.1 celebration fun!

Agenda:

12:30 – 1:15 – Registration and Networking
1:15 – 1:30 – ATUG contest presentations
1:30 – 2:30 – 6.1 Launch Demo and Q&A – Led by Tableau
2:30 – 3:00 – Hands-on Demos, Drawings and More
3:00 – Networking and Celebration

A minor release? Think again, come and see all we’ve rolled into the latest release of Tableau.

Mobile Business Intelligence - Tableau’s new touch-enabled visualizations and native iPad app let you get business intelligence anywhere you need it.
Localization and Maps - French and German versions of Tableau Desktop and Server and more map options mean that asking “where?” yields richer answers.
Fresh, Fast Data - It’s even easier to be up-to-the-minute and secure with all your data.

Who should attend? Tableau User groups are open to any Tableau customers and enthusiasts.

Chart abuse: A stacked column chart dissected

2011-07-13T19:47:00.001-04:00

I ran across this chart today on the Chart of the Day blog. From the article:

“Below is a look at the number of running backs selected in the first round during the Super Bowl era (1967-2010) as well as the number of running backs taken among the top ten picks.”

This stacked column chart needs improvement. Why?

The commentary for the chart is misleading. It indicates that your comparing the total running backs drafted in the first round to those in the top 10, which would lead you to believe the top 10 is percentage of the total running backs.
How can you tell how many running backs were taken in the top 10? You have to guess at that number since there’s no vertical axis.
What do the labels on the bars mean? Do they reference the # of Other 1st Rounders or the Top 10 picks or both?
Stacked bars can make it challenging to compare the bars other than the lowest bar. In this case, a line chart would be a better way to compare the other 1st rounders, though that would defeat the overall purpose of the chart…to show the total number of 1st round picks by year.

ATUG Contest: Geographically based Economic data

2011-06-27T10:20:00.001-04:00

At most ATUG (Facebook, LinkedIn) meetings we conduct a group exercise in which the attendees break into small groups, are given an unfamiliar dataset, have 45 minutes to build a dashboard, then present their dashboards. This past week, due to the richness of the dataset, none of the teams were able to build anything within the time allotted.

After talking with Tableau, we are turning this into a contest for the ATUG members. Each member or team that participates will present their dashboard at the next meeting on July 21st (Tableau will host the meeting and present v6.1). Entries will be judged by John Hoover, Dan Murray and I (and maybe someone from Tableau). We’re working on a prize with Tableau.

To be eligible, you must attend the next ATUG meeting in person, but if anyone else wants to submit a viz, please do so; it’s a great dataset. You can post your entries via comment to this blog post.

The contest is based on the Yale University G-Econ research project. From their website:

The G-Econ research project is devoted to developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world. The current data set (GEcon 4.0) is now publicly available and covers "gross cell product" for all regions for 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 and includes 27,500 terrestrial observations. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product. Gross cell product (GCP) is measured at a 1-degree longitude by 1-degree latitude resolution at a global scale.

You can find the following at this link (http://db.tt/iM3MdEx):

The data in XLS, XLSX and Tableau Data Extract format (I have built a few custom calcs and a parameter into the extract). The fields have some funky names, so refer to the “definitions” tab in the Excel workbook for explanations (I have renamed a few of them in the Tableau workbook).
A Tableau packaged workbook (ATUG June 2011.tbwx)
Meeting materials from the last meeting (for those curious to see the content of a typical ATUG meeting)

Below is a sample dashboard I created. Be patient as the viz loads. There are 27k+ data points that need to load into each map.

You can filter the maps by lassoing an area on any of the maps. Lasso South America in the Population Change map and you’ll see a cool display in the other three maps.
Use the Year selector next to the Population Change map to see the population change over time. Notice how much movement there has been from 2000-2005 versus 1990-2005.

Good luck! Send me an email if you have any questions.

LeBron James’ Effectiveness – My Take

2011-06-24T13:28:00.001-04:00

I love the chart above from the I Love Charts blog. However, shouldn’t the x-axis be Q1-Q4. :-)

How wide is the UK education gap? Hint: It’s wider than you think

2011-06-13T21:24:00.001-04:00

Back in December I critiqued a viz about the gap between the Russell Group of universities and several of the rest. The postgrad.com Data Visualization Challenge sparked me work on part 2 of my analysis.

Over here in the States, when you hear of Oxford or Cambridge, you think of exclusivity and an incredible (and incredibly expensive) education. I never knew much about the UK educational system until recently, thanks to the Guardian Datablog.

I’ve once again turned to the flexibility of Tableau (the parameters feature is a huge help) to create this viz which details the gap between what is essentially the rich and the poor. Play around with the colors, shape sizes and the scatter plot. Click on a bubble and its stats will appear at the bottom.

You’ll certainly find something interesting including:

Kings College London has the highest % of free school meal students, but only at 5.3% (the average is 6.47%)
Oxford is indeed elitism, at least the data suggest such: 47% of students are independent while only 0.8% are FSM
60 of the 87 schools in the dataset (69%) have a below average % of independent students, none of the schools being in the Russell Group

What do you see?

Join us at the June Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up!

2011-06-13T09:44:00.001-04:00

Please join us Thursday, June 23rd from 1:00 - 4:00 pm at Coca-cola for a hands-on user group meeting.

This event is a time to share, listen, network and discuss experiences and opportunities with other Tableau users.

Information:

Thursday, June 23rd from 1:00 - 4:00 pm
Coca-cola, 2 Coca Cola Plaza - Learning Room 6, Atlanta, GA 30313 - Map
Register here

Agenda:

Training - Efficient use of Tableau (Laura Hussey, FTI)
Team Project - TARP: Uncover the data
Open Forum

Bring your laptop equipped with Tableau because this will be a hands-on session.

IMPORTANT - Plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early. You must check in with security and tell them you are there for the Atlanta Tableau User Group meeting. They will call Andy Kriebel to come get you.

We look forward to seeing you!

Facts are friendly: Why Cobb County should keep the balanced calendar

2011-06-07T10:19:00.001-04:00

NOTE: The data and charts in this post are excerpts from “The Citizens Report on the Cobb County School District Attendance Calendar”. There are limitations on the data, but overall I think you’ll agree that the School Board has made an incredible unwise decision to revert to the traditional school calendar.

Summary
The data shows overwhelming support for the Balanced Calendar by all stakeholder groups: teachers, staff, parents, students, and the community. The data points are:

2009 Employee Survey
2011 Calendar Survey
Board Member Reports & Email Counts
2011 Cobb County Association of Educators Survey

The results of these four data points are remarkably consistent. When presented with the opportunity for a school calendar with a shorter summer and additional week-long breaks versus a later August start date and no additional week-long breaks, all stakeholder groups strongly prefer a calendar with a shorter summer and additional week-long breaks.

Across all data points the margin of preference for the Balanced Calendar is significant, averaging 76.1%. The support ranges from a low of 61.0% to a high of 88.2%.

Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS)
Grade Equivalency (GE) scores for Cobb’s third, fifth, and seventh graders had all been declining in recent years. However, for the first time since 2007, ITBS GE scores in Cobb County increased in 2010 in all of these grade levels.

End-of-Course Test (EOCT)
Results in ELA and Social Studies have maintained a slight but steady increase through the 2010-2011 school year. Results in Science showed a slight decrease in 2010-2011, returning to their 2008 level of 71% meeting or exceeding standards. After a 23% decline in 2008-2009, results in Math dramatically improved by 26% in 2009-2010. They continued to improve by another 11% to 75% in 2010-2011, reaching a level not obtained since 2006-2007.

Teacher absences
Absences down significantly YTD through March 2011 as compared to the last three school years.

This amounts to 15,008.7 fewer days teachers were absent in 2010-2011 versus 2009-2010 through March. This has two benefits. The first is the direct benefit of lower expenses for substitute teachers. Specifically, the direct financial savings are $1,118,381.26 YTD through March 2011, due to lower expenses for substitute teachers. Second, our students benefited by having their own certified teachers in the classroom more often.

Student absenteeism
Absenteeism was down 27,600 days in the first semester of the 2010-2011 school year (August - December 2010). This represents a decrease of 7.5% district-wide as compared to the first semester of the 2009-2010 school year.

Of 120 schools, 75.8% reported improvements in student attendance and 24.2% reported an increase in student absenteeism. As student attendance is the second AYP indicator for elementary and middle schools, the influence of the school calendar on student attendance is vitally important.

Student Discipline
Data available from the Georgia Department of Education (DIS010) through May 17, 2011 shows:

Once the year-end data is available for 2010-2011, the results will need to be adjusted for inclement weather days and the shorter 175-day school year. In total, these two factors should account for 3.4% of any decrease in student discipline.

The most dangerous States (if you don’t like disasters)

2011-06-06T16:33:00.001-04:00

The news cycle has been focused on weather disasters lately, particularly tornados. Thanks to the Guardian (get the data here) we can now “see” the trouble. The data covers 1959-2010. It’d be nice to have 2011 YTD in the dataset as well since there seem to have been so many tornados.

There are many options with which to filter on the right and if you want to see the list of disasters for a state or county, simply click on the bubble.

There are some really cool cuts of the data:

Filter by hurricanes; the gulf coast lights up!
I didn’t know North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa had so many floods
Avoid any states along the Mississippi River if you don’t like tornados (and Georgia too)
Georgia has had the most recorded tornados since 1959…that both surprises and scares me, especially since they’re in North Georgia
There have been more earthquakes in Washington state than California. Who would have thought that?
9/11 is categorized as a Terrorist attack in Virginia, yet it’s listed as a Fire in New York. Data cleanliness at its finest!

Do you see anything else interesting? There is so much to explore.

Tableau Viz Contest (Support my entry) – Diet Coke is now the #2 brand…The cola wars continue!

2011-06-03T11:33:00.000-04:00

Please take a second to click this link to give me a quick show of support: http://bit.ly/lo58QV

The Tableau Interactive “Viz” contest closed Friday. The winner chosen will take away a free roundtrip ticket to attend the 2011 Tableau Customer Conference. This includes 3 night’s accommodations at the Encore and a chance to compete in the Iron Viz championship with the winners of two other contests. The winner of Iron Viz will take away a new iPad2, and $2,000.

My time was limited to work on the contest (I’m busy blowing people away with Tableau in my real job) so I updated a viz I created back in December. The key difference now is that Diet Coke has overtaken Pepsi as the #2 preferred soft drink brand in the world. You read that right, Coke & Diet Coke are now #1 and #2. I think we know who’s winning the cola wars now!

The viz below is a cleaned up, simplified version of my December viz. The purpose is simple, how is Coke performing compared to Pepsi. Compare historical price trends and shares traded over time. Using the “Choose a time frame” selector, you can view the data by Year, Quarter, Month or Day…you pick the level of detail you want to see. You can also drill down to specific years (the data starts in 1977 since that’s when Pepsi went public).

How to see a tornado at the Subway Series

2011-05-31T16:10:00.001-04:00

On May 23, Sports Chart of the Day published this chart comparing wins and runs scored in the Subway Series (i.e., Yankees vs. Mets).

There are some fundamental problems with this chart:

The stacked bars are irrelevant and misleading. Wins and runs scored are two very distinct stats and adding them together makes no sense whatsoever.
Are these stacked bars or overlaid bars?
The years are sorted in reverse order. This makes it much more difficult to see trends because you have to get your brain to think backwards in time
The labels create too much chart junk
The dark gray background…why do so many of their charts have this background? I don’t get it.

I recreated the data in Excel and threw it into Tableau and came up with three simple alternatives: a tornado chart, a line chart and a bullet chart. Which on is your favorite? What can you do with the data? Download the workbook and leave a comment with a link to your viz.

The World’s Deadliest Roads – Watch out for cars in Africa

2011-05-24T09:34:00.001-04:00

Before you travel around the world, you may want to consider where you are safest. According to the Guardian, road traffic accidents “kill more people around the world than malaria”. While China would obviously have the highest number of accidents based on the size of the population, I was surprised that many countries in Africa and the Middle East have such a high incidence of deaths (measured as deaths per 100K of population).

Use the interactive viz below to see if anything stands out to you. One good way to look at the data to really make the death rate in Africa stand out is to choose “Estimated Deaths per 100K” for both the color and the size. What do you see?

If you like baseball, you’ll love the Titans!

2011-05-20T17:00:00.001-04:00

This summer I embark on a 7 week journey with my oldest son through baseball all-stars (his team is the 10U Oregon Park Titans). There are many ways to keep up with the team through their adventures:

Team Website
Facebook Fan Page
Flickr photos
Follow games live on GameChanger (there’s an iPhone app too)

If you would like to sponsor the Titans, please visit the team website and then click on the “Sponsor the Titans” link or click here to access the sponsorship form directly. There are many sponsorship levels available.

It’s pretty safe to assume that I’ll be keeping track of the stats and will post them in a viz at the end of the season.

Go Titans!

Are you a data rock star? If so, strut your stuff for a chance to win an iPad2

2011-05-20T08:29:00.001-04:00

All of the details can be found here.

Enter Now to Win…

It's easy to enter the competition and you could win:

Recognition from a panel of industry experts in journalism, data visualization and design
Your name and work promoted across the web
A proud and noteworthy addition to your portfolio, website or CV
A full post profiling you and your work, and the design process you followed
A signed copy of Information is Beautiful by David McCandless
A brand new iPad2

It's An Open Brief

The competition is based on the data collected by David, and other sources listed within the dataset. However, you are free to mash up the data with any other source you wish, provided the sources are publicly available and cited in your entry to the competition.
Your visualization can be static, moving or interactive
You can include as little or as much text as you like
It can be as simple as a single chart or a full-blown infographic

The Datasets

You can find find the data collected by David McCandless here

You may also find the following resources useful

And Remember, the Competition Closes at 11pm GMT on Monday 20th June 2011.

Is Netflix eating bandwidth or pie?

2011-05-18T08:12:00.001-04:00

From Chart of the Day. I suspect you know my opinion here. You tell me which on is easier to read.

I have a friend with cancer and I don’t like this

2011-05-12T12:04:00.000-04:00

Adding unnecessary precision to bar chart labels

2011-05-11T09:39:00.001-04:00

Overall, this is a good chart. But I do have a couple of nitpicky things:

Not sure I like the title. It’s not how “you” spend your time, but the time of those surveyed. Maybe something like “Average iPad Usage Time”.
The bar labels on the blue and red bars need to be consistent. First, they don’t have the same format (blue has two decimal places, red has none). Second, does the level of precision matter? Does this chart need to be so specific that people will actually care if web browsing is 37.70% vs. 38%? I would round to the nearest whole number.
The horizontal scale lines should be more transparent. I find my eye drawn to the lines because they are so bold.

What else do you see?

Join us at the May Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up!

2011-05-04T09:14:00.001-04:00

Date: May 19th - 1:00pm EDT
Duration: 180 minutes
Location:
Norfolk Southern Building
1200 Peachtree Street NE
Atlanta, GA 30309
See map: Google Maps

Agenda:

· Training: Tableau Server

· Networking

· Training

· June Meeting Planning

This will be a hands-on session so bring your laptop equipped with Tableau.

RSVP

Gas prices are approaching $4/gallon. What are you paying?

2011-05-04T08:27:00.001-04:00

As we approach gas prices averaging $4/gallon in the US, prices not seen since 2008, we’re all looking for a “good deal”. Click on this fabulous heat map from GasBuddy.com to find the best prices in your area.

A quick glance at my area shows I’m averaging around $3.85-$3.90.

Prices have gone up about $2 since the same time in 2009. Click the chart to see the trend in your area.

Who’s visiting the VizWiz?

2011-05-03T23:12:00.001-04:00

I started this blog 624 days ago on August 17, 2009 with the goal of helping others (and me) learn best practices for data visualization. There have been many twists and turns and the backlog of blog posts has gotten quite long. The breadth of the audience of this blog worldwide has both fascinated and humbled me. 145 blog posts later, here are the stats, visualized of course.

The bubbles are sized based on the rank of the country for the stat & time frame chosen. The color is based on the stat chosen.

Thanks for the visits and comments. I learn a lot from your feedback.

When someone misleads you with a dual-axis chart, fight back! Data Viz Done Right!

2011-04-29T15:02:00.001-04:00

My good friend Joe Mako published this version of the chart I ranted about earlier today. Now THIS chart tells the story correctly.

The goods:

2001 – The red line is at 88%, while the blue line is at 79%
2011 - The red line and blue line are both at about 114%

No dual-axis needed! Chart junk be gone! What a difference!

How to tell a completely opposite story with a dual-axis chart (This might make you sick!)

2011-04-29T14:09:00.002-04:00

Look at the chart below from Chart of the Day. One question, 5 seconds. How much has the variance changed between the two lines from 2001 and 2011?

I’m going to guess you came up with:

2001 – The red line is about 1% lower than the blue line
2011 - The red line is about 10% lower than the blue line
Therefore, the total change is 9%

If that's what you guessed, you’re wrong, completely wrong! Why?

The axes are not synchronized
The axis on the left is for the blue line, whereas the axis on the right is for the red line
How can I be sure? There are gray headers at the top of each axis.

This is incredibly confusing and incredibly misleading!

What’s the real answer?

2001 – The red line is at 88%, while the blue line is at 79%. The red line is 9% higher than the blue line, not 1% lower like I thought
2011 - The red line and blue line are both at about 114%, not the 10% variance I supposed
Therefore, the total change is actually 0%, not 9%

This is one of the worst and most misleading dual-axis charts I’ve ever seen. At a glance it looked like blue was slightly ahead of red then the gap got really wide in blue’s favor. However, it’s the complete opposite.

Scary, scary, scary!

Will donuts be served at the Royal Wedding?

2011-04-29T00:01:00.001-04:00

I was contacted by a follower of my blog yesterday that lives in the UK and works for Autonet Insurance Group. She asked if I would host their infographic on this blog, but I only agreed once she confirmed it was ok that I critique it a bit. I have very limited experience creating infographics, but I am a firm believer that you should always present data in the most simple format to understand.

Keep in mind that Wikipedia defines Information Graphics as “visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly.” Maybe this is why I’m not a huge fan of them. Scroll down below Autonet’s infographic for my improvements.

Infographic by Autonet Insurance

First, I love the content and the descriptions; they’re very informative. However,

I despise donut charts just as much as pie charts, although donut charts give me the sensation of riding a bike for some reason. In this donut, it’s challenging to differentiate some of the colors and there’s no particular order that I can discern.
The bubbles at the bottom are designed to show the relative differences in the cost of the insurance. But no one can tell me that the bubble representing Prince Charles’ wedding to Lady Diana in 1981 is 7,000 times smaller than the bubble representing Prince William’s upcoming marriage to Kate Middleton.

While this view below doesn’t give any of the great details of the infographics and doesn’t look as snazzy, it does make the comparisons much, much easier.

And if you insist on a donut chart, how about something like this?

US peace index: how does each state compare?

2011-04-28T00:59:00.001-04:00

Via the Guardian Datablog, questions to ponder:

Which is the most violent state?
Which are getting better/worse?

Click on a state either in the map or the bar chart to update the trend. Filter to the years you want to see with the table on the lower-left.

It’s pretty clear that the peace index is worst in the south. I wonder if there is any correlation to gun control laws?

Can you compare values without a scale? Not in this case.

2011-04-19T11:49:00.001-04:00

From Nielsen. There’s no explanation in the article as to the scale, nor are any numbers mentioned. How am I supposed to compare men 35+ that are planning to purchase HDTVs to women 35+?

This chart could be whole numbers, percentages, those planning to buy on the 2nd Saturday next week. This is a really poor effort.

To mislead or not to mislead, that is the question

2011-04-15T09:23:00.001-04:00

Have you ever received a chart similar to this? I did and was flabbergasted. What disturbed me most was that it was intentionally misleading. The other people who saw the chart didn’t notice the major problem that the dual-axes are not synchronized (and a dual-axis chart is unnecessary in this case anyway).

I quickly corrected the chart and shared how it should look. They were stunned at the the different stories these charts tell at first glance.

Bottom line: be skeptical when someone sends you a chart and quickly correct the situation if needed. Take Mar-11 as an example:

In the first chart it looks like Group E is only 2% better than Group Y
In the second chart you can clearly see the gap is much, much bigger

Now take a quick look at Dec-10 (don’t cheat and look at the data). In the 1st chart you’d think Group Y is killing Group E, when in fact Group E is outperforming Group Y.

It’s a scary world out there when people try to intentionally mislead you in an effort to support their personal agenda. A friend of mine likes to say “Facts are friendly”. Presenting facts needs to be friendly as well.

Internet Connections Speeds – Why Nielsen should avoid stacked column charts

2011-04-07T09:03:00.001-04:00

Another interesting report released by Nielsen, this time they measured the internet connection speeds of nine countries. They presented the results as a stacked column chart.

One of the biggest problems with stacked bar or column charts is that it’s very difficult to compare values other than those at the bottom or top. In the Nielsen chart, it takes some time for your eyes to rank any of the measures other than “Above 8Mb”. I’ve turned to Tableau and presented several alternatives. Scroll through the tabs to see each.

I also used a parameter control to allow sorting by any of the measures. This allows you to quickly rank the countries for any of the speeds. My personal favorite is the “Favorite” tab. Which is yours? How else would you present the data?

MLB Agents – Who represents whom visualized

2011-04-05T16:33:00.001-04:00

From Chart of the Day (data courtesy MLB Trade Rumors Player Agency Database):

Contrary to popular belief, Scott Boras does not represent every big league player. He doesn't even represent all of the biggest names. In fact, Boras Corporation doesn't even represent the most baseball players. That distinction belongs to SFX World.

The Pareto principle is nearly in affect here – 29 of the 117 agencies (25%) account for 80% of the players. Click on any of the lines are bars to see the players and teams those agencies represent. Visit MLB Trade Rumors by clicking on the little red start on the logo.

A Nielsen Table Improved - Number of Americans Watching Mobile Video

2011-04-04T10:17:00.001-04:00

A blog post from Nielsen says:

According to a new mobile video report from The Nielsen Company, the number of U.S. mobile subscribers watching video on their mobile devices rose more than 40 percent year-over-year in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010, ending the year at nearly 25 million people.

They presented their results with this table:

What’s wrong here?

Their summary says watching improved in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010, but why isn’t Q3 09 on the table?
Why do they include Q3 10 if they don’t include the quarter to quarter comparison?
The table is quite dark and dreary, with unnecessary color

I would reformat the table like this.

I have:

Added Q3 09 along with quarter over quarter comparisons (% diff on the right) and year over year comparisons (% diff at the bottom)
Removed any unnecessary color

While Nielsen’s report says “the number of U.S. mobile subscribers watching video on their mobile devices rose more than 40 percent year-over-year in both the third and fourth quarters of 2010”, they fail to point out that growth has actually slowed in 2010, both quarter over quarter and year over year.

Bottom line, be careful what you read. I hope not, but Nielsen may have intentionally left out Q3 09 to paint a better picture.

Student Achievement in the Cobb County School District – Is the Balanced Calendar Working?

2011-04-03T21:16:00.001-04:00

I’ve previously published research regarding the Cobb County School Board’s decision to revert to the “traditional” calendar. Much to the dismay of the board members, many of the parents have not let this unpopular change go away.

In a very rare move, the Cobb school board was called to testify in front of a grand jury to discuss the recent calendar decision and the board’s overall decision-making process. The outcome/recommendation from the grand jury will likely not be known until early-May.

The remainder of this blog post contains excerpts from research conducted by a friend and fellow Cobb County parent with respect to academic gains achieved to-date under the “balanced” calendar. View the research in its entirety here or see the bottom of this post.

In November of 2009, the CCSD approved a balanced calendar for a three-year period to begin in 2010-2011. The district committed to monitor the impact of the balanced calendar on key operational areas including student achievement.

On February 17, 2011, the Board of Education overturned this decision before the first year under the balanced calendar had even been completed, approving “traditional” calendars for the following two school years. Although this reversal was shocking, even more stunning was the fact that the board overturned its 2009 decision without honoring the commitment made to the district when the balanced calendar plan was established.

Because the 2010-2011 school year has not yet been completed, a full assessment of student achievement under the balanced calendar is not possible. However, the three assessments completed to date – The Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), The Georgia High School Writing Test (GHSWT), and the End-of-Course Test (EOCT) – can provide some insight into the impact of the balanced calendar on student achievement.

The Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS)

Students are assessed in the fall on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). This is a norm-referenced assessment that measures student achievement in comparison to other students nationwide. Students in grades 3, 5, and 7 are tested in Reading, Mathematics, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and Sources of Information. Results include:

ITBS Grade Equivalency (GE) scores for Cobb’s third, fifth, and seventh graders had all been declining in recent years. However, for the first time since 2007, ITBS GE scores in Cobb County increased in 2010
In 2010, GE scores for third graders increased to 3.59, an increase of 3.5% in just one year
GE scores for fifth graders increased 1.8% in 2010 to 6.05
GE scores for Cobb’s seventh graders increased slightly by 0.6% to reach 8.05 in 2010
Percentile rankings for all three grade levels increased by 1.5% in 2010

The Georgia High School Writing Test (GHSWT)

High school students are assessed on the Georgia High School Graduation Tests (GHSGT) and the Georgia High School Writing Test (GHSWT). Most students take the GHSWT during the fall of their junior year and are required to pass the test to earn a regular education diploma. Results include:

GHSWT results improved by 3.3% in 2008 with 95% of the students passing the assessment
Results declined slightly in 2009, falling to 94%
Results have increased dramatically in 2010 with a 4.3% increase to an all-time high of 98%

End-of-Course Test (EOCT)

All students take the End-of-Course Test (EOCT) after completing various courses in four different categories: English and Language Arts (ELA), Math, Science, and Social Studies. Results of the EOCT are used for diagnostic, remedial and accountability purposes to gauge the quality of education in the state and also count as part of the student's final grade in the course. Results include:

Results in ELA and Social Studies have maintained a slight but steady increase through the 2010-2011 school year
Results in Science showed a slight decrease in 2010-2011, returning to their 2008 level of 71%
After a 23% decline in 2008-2009, results in Math dramatically improved by 26% in 2009-2010. They continued to improve by another 11% to 75% in 2010-2011, reaching a level not obtained since 2006-2007

Summary

Quantifiable year-to-date student achievement in the Cobb County School District during the first year of the Balanced Calendar can be summarized as follows:

ITBS Grade Equivalency scores and national percentile rankings had all been declining in recent years but increased in 2010-2011 for the first time since 2007
GHSWT passing rates had improved in 2008-2009 and declined in 2009-2010, but then they increased dramatically in 2010-2011 to an all-time high
In 2010-2011, EOCT passing rates declined slightly in science, continued a steady increase in ELA and social studies, and continued to increase significantly in math

Of course, the results of only three assessments cannot definitively establish the impact of the balanced calendar on student achievement. Ten total assessments are published each year in the CCSD, and full evaluations of all ten at the end of the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years would have provided the most reliable gauge of the balanced calendar’s impact.

However, these are the only assessments that have been completed to date, and one thing can be said for certain. The balanced calendar has not had an adverse affect on student achievement in the Cobb County School District to date in 2010-2011. In fact, all indications so far suggest that the balanced calendar has had a positive impact on student achievement and is promoting improved results.

When measuring home runs, a bar chart is better than a column chart

2011-04-01T17:53:00.001-04:00

From Chart of the Day:

For me, this chart is quite hard to read because (1) you have to tilt your head 90 degrees to read anything and (2) the background is unnecessarily dark. A bar chart would be far superior; you’d be able to read left-to-right, just like a book.

Adding the player name inside the bar stumped me for a bit, but this solution on Tableau forum proved useful (via Joe Mako).

Caution: Using Tableau live in a meeting may lead to lots of work!

2011-03-29T08:17:00.001-04:00

I’ve been working on a project for the last couple of weeks, the centerpiece being analysis done in Tableau. While it took 90% of the time to cobble together the data, it only took about 30 minutes to an hour to build the Tableau workbook. I used Tableau live in the meeting, exposing the incredible functionality that parameters and data blending provide. Here are some of the comments I heard:

“How can we get this tool? It would have saved us weeks of work that we had to spend building bubble charts in Excel.”

“Unbelievable! It’s so easy to see our opportunities.”

“Do that again!”

“I like what you’ve show us, but I’d love to see ‘X’ vs. ‘Y’ (can’t tell you what). Can you add that in the next version?” (I proceeded to create a new worksheet and show her exactly what she wanted in under 30 seconds. To say she was blown away would be a huge understatement.)

The comments and feedback went on and on. Every single person in the meeting wanted to get their hands on it. I’ve distributed the workbook via Tableau Reader. What about that guy that spent all of that time in Excel? He’s going to buy a license any day now (I better start getting some commissions from Tableau!).

Unfortunately, one of the outcomes of showing these capabilities is that it leads to even more projects. I guess that’s a good problem to have.

Creating vs. Finishing – A Follow-up to OnFooty for the Premier League

2011-03-26T22:23:00.001-04:00

On Football has quickly become one of my favorite blogs to follow (Twitter) and one of the most interesting posts of late was an analysis of “finishing” in Major League Soccer. OnFooty analyzed conversation rate vs. the number of shots for each team over the total season. Typically conversion rate is calculated as goals/shots on target, but OnFooty has a terrific case for using shots in lieu of shots on target.

In conclusion, Sarah said “The upper right quadrant (teams that are above average at both creating and finishing) contains the MLS Cup Finalists and the number one seeds for each conference.

This quickly led me to the Premier League and interestingly enough, the same analysis holds true through 30 rounds (29 for some teams) this season. The top four teams are all in the upper-right quadrant.

If you follow English football, you might note these things as well:

Tottenham needs to improve their finishing if they want to secure a returns spot into the Champions League qualification round (for the 4th place finisher)
Blackpool (one of the most exciting teams to watch) score at a terrific rate, but since they’re in 15th place in the table, they obviously need to work on their defense (their philosophy is to outscore their opponents since they know they can’t stop them
Wigan has the worst conversion rate and sits last in the table…enough said

Play with the view below. Choose your vertical and horizontal axis, check out the different tabs. What do you see?

I’m compelled to look historically to see if this theory holds true season after season…maybe one day when I have more time on my hands (I’m busy tallying stats for my daughter’s soccer team).

I HATE the Cowgirls!

2011-03-26T20:58:00.001-04:00

I grew up in Philadelphia and if there’s one thing you learn, it’s to HATE the Cowgirls! Jerry Jones is so egotistical, but then again, he sure knows how to run a profitable business.

View the original blog post here.

April Atlanta Tableau User Group Meet-up

2011-03-25T20:27:00.001-04:00

Please join us Thursday, April 21st from 1:00 - 4:00 pm at Coca-Cola for a hands-on user group meeting.

This event is a time to share, listen, network and discuss experiences and opportunities with other Tableau users.

Information:

Thursday, April 21st from 1:00 - 4:00 pm
Coca-Cola, 2 Coca Cola Plaza - Learning Room 4, Atlanta, GA 30313 - Map
Register here

Agenda:

Demo: Using Tableau with a Vertica Data Source
Networking
Training: Dashboards & Actions
Team Activity
Map Planning Discussion

Bring your laptop equipped with Tableau because this will be a hands-on session.

IMPORTANT – You must check-in with security and tell them you are there for the Atlanta Tableau User Group meeting. They will then call me to come get you. I will have people in the lobby to help usher you to the training room as the room is across the campus. Plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early

We look forward to seeing you!

The magic washing machine: Hans Rosling

2011-03-23T08:35:00.001-04:00

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.

Climbing the mountain of the NBA's all-time leading scorers

2011-03-22T09:06:00.001-04:00

I absolutely love this chart. Why do I like it so much?

The active players are clearly marked
It’s uncluttered
But my most favorite is the ascending ranking; it gives me the impression that Kobe is climbing a mountain, which he really is given how far he needs to go to get anywhere near Kareem

The only thing I would have changed is the background. The dark gray background makes the blue/gray bars a bit tough to see.

A 17-slice pie chart is a bit excessive

2011-03-19T23:30:00.001-04:00

The commentary included with the pie chart below is fantastic, but the pie chart is absolutely horrible.

A simple bar char is much more effective. With the bar chart, it’s so much easier to see just how favored Ohio State is to win the tournament. Also, there’s no color legend, therefore you’re not tempted to assume the colors mean something.

With the bar chart, I can clearly see that Florida and UNC are way overrated and Texas is way underrated (the seeds are in parentheses).

Cobb County schools with a high reduction in student absences are down more than 3 to 1 to high increases

2011-03-15T08:52:00.001-04:00

There was a biased comment made by Mr. Sweeney (email him here to call him out on it) during the discussion phase last week of the Cobb County School Board meeting. He started spouting off schools that have had significant INCREASES in student absence. While the schools he mentioned did indeed have a high increase in absences, he failed to mention some key facts.

Only 15 of 199 (12.6%) schools had a > 10% increase in absences, meanwhile 48 of 119 (40.3%) schools had a > 10% DECREASE in absences. It's disappointing that none of the other board members called him on this (though I know three of them never would).

Why The Newspaper Industry Collapsed

2011-03-14T21:38:00.001-04:00

From the Chart of the Day, an excellent depiction of the fall of newspapers. I like everything about this chart: it’s clear, concise, to the point and very easy to read.

REMINDER: Join us Thursday, March 17th from 1- 4 pm for the next Atlanta Tableau User Group!

2011-03-14T21:03:00.000-04:00

Register here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/usergroups/atlanta-mar-2011

Agenda:
- Opening Introductions
- Training - Parameters
- Networking
- Training - Data Blending
- April Meeting Planning

This will be a hands-on session so bring your laptop equipped with Tableau.

Facts are friendly. Why the Cobb County School Board should reinstate the balanced calendar.

2011-03-09T11:03:00.002-05:00

Today I presented the information below at the monthly Cobb County School Board meeting. As some background, the previous board approved a three-year “balanced” calendar that provides more frequent breaks throughout the year. However, a new board was “elected” (some ran unopposed) and they decided that, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of the balanced calendar, they wanted to go back to the “traditional” calendar.

Naturally, I used Tableau to analyze the data that was provided by the county itself (some board members were using their own data which could neither be validated nor would they share). The key points:

The Balanced Calendar has resulted in a 26% reduction in teacher absences for a total savings of $987K. Previously when this data has been presented, it has not factored in the additional savings that result from a $10 decrease in daily substitute pay.
The Balanced Calendar has resulted in a 4.2% reduction of student absences, with over 75% of school reporting a reduction in absences. In the past, analysis has not considered that there were 88 schools days in 2010 compared to 85 in 2011. Another interesting fact is that a school board member reported incorrect information. I corrected him.
Utility cost trends are in alignment with my costs at home. My assumption, though likely too broad, is that my utility costs are in alignment with other residents of Cobb county.

The board is supposed to vote on the calendar again today or tomorrow, but I’m not holding out hope that the board members that voted against the balanced calendar will be swayed by facts.

I closed my comments with the following from Seth Godin:

Before we invest a lot of time in evidence-based discussions, please tell us what evidence you would need to see in order to change your mind. If the honest answer is, "well, actually, there's nothing you could show me that would change my mind," you've just saved everyone a lot of time. Please don't bother having fact-less discussions.

HR output – 1920-2008: Which teams should be feared?

2011-03-07T15:17:00.002-05:00

As a follow up to the comments from my recent blog post on ranking a team’s total HR output, I have put together this simple interactive viz using Tableau Public.

The data covers 1920 through 2008 (1920 was the start of the live ball era) and measures three stats:

Total home runs over the history of each franchise (the oldest teams will nearly always be ranked at the top)
Total home runs per year for each franchise
Total home runs per game for each franchise

Click on a team name and the viz will:

Highlight the bar charts to allow for comparison within the three categories
Update trend charts to reflect only the team selected

What do you see?

March Atlanta Tableau User Group Meeting - March 17th from 1-4pm @ Norfolk Southern

2011-03-01T09:31:00.001-05:00

Join us Thursday, March 17th from 1- 4 pm for the next Atlanta Tableau User Group!

Agenda:
- Opening Introductions
- Training - Parameters
- Networking
- Training - Data Blending
- April Meeting Planning

This will be a hands-on session so bring your laptop equipped with Tableau.

What’s the best measure of a team’s HR ranking? Three alternative measures.

2011-02-28T22:24:00.003-05:00

Joe Mako posted the following comment about my post on all-time HR rankings: “What about consideration for the year? Seems to me that comparing the total number of home runs of teams that have been around for a over 100 years to teams that have been around for just a few dozen years does not seem useful. Is there data that tracks the number of home runs by team per year? If so maybe the data could be normalized, or viewed differently.”

Three measures that are likely a better indicator include HR/Game, HR/Year, and HR/Win. Colorado now comes in at #1 in all three categories, with Arizona in the top 3 in all three of these categories. The Yankees, Giants, Cubs and Braves are all much, much farther down the list now. Remember, normalizing the data can very often be your friend, unless of course you want to intentionally skew the data.

All-Time Home Runs – Charting it so you can read it

2011-02-28T21:44:00.001-05:00

Chart of the Day has recently become one of my favorite blogs to follow. I like the content/writing, typically the visual displays are good and there are lots of posts about sports. There have been more posts about baseball recently as spring training has already begun.

Today they posted this chart:

Quick, which team is #5 all-time? Can’t find it very easily can you? This chart has a few basic design flaws:

A bar chart would be more effective as it would rotate the labels so that they are easier to read.
The sorting could be done better. It’s sorted by when they joined the major leagues (see the numbers inside the bars), but that’s distracting to me. My brain is trying to order these in a more logical way
The gridlines are too strong. Yes, they are gray, but they could be more muted; they grab too much attention

Here’s how I would have presented the data (note that my data only goes through 2008, but you get the idea):

Quick, which team is #5 all-time? I bet that only took 1-2 seconds. Much easier, wouldn’t you say? Notice that I’ve addressed all of the problems above:

The team names and stats are much, much easier to read
The teams are sorted by the number of home runs in the franchise’s history, which makes more sense for this chart. You could still have the year in the bar, but it doesn’t add any value to the chart, therefore it’s chart junk
The gridlines are much less noticeable, but can still be used for reference if needed

Have your say below.

A broken Electorate system. The Cobb County school calendar poll results visualized.

2011-02-18T21:53:00.001-05:00

Last year, the Cobb County Board of Education voted on a balanced school calendar that starts school at the beginning of August and provides more frequent breaks throughout the year. Despite this being voted in as a three-year calendar, some of the recently elected board members put forth a motion to change the calendar back to a more traditional calendar. Here are the results from the survey they conducted to get community feedback:

View the School Board’s version of the results here. I wonder if they intentionally put the results on separate pages to make it difficult to compare them side by side. In the view above, you can clearly see that community overwhelmingly favors the August 1 calendar (the current calendar).

Which way did the school board vote? 4-3 in favor of the August 15th calendar. Seriously! How the hell does this happen? Watch the motion hearing here.

Needless to say, parents are outraged.

In a Democracy, an Electorate system is often put in place so that the interests of many are represented by a few. The way it is “supposed” to work is that the representatives heavily weigh the opinions of their electorate when making decisions, but clearly four members of the school board have not in this case. It’s incredibly sad that special interests appear to have played a part in the vote, but then again, that’s nothing new here in the USA; votes can easily be bought (see campaign contributions and pork barrel spending).

Some quotes of note:

WSB-TV: School board member Tim Stultz said “I'm not prepared to let one side just rule because they have majority numbers.”

Marietta Daily Journal:Beth Kriebel (a parent, PTA member, and my wife) spoke at the meeting and said “I think you’re taking a huge risk in changing something that greatly impacts any family that has a student in the school district. While campaign promises were made last year by some of you, what about the majority of Cobb County parents who have adjusted to the balanced calendar on good faith that no changes would be made?”

I’m proud of my wife for standing up and representing the interests of the great majority of Cobb County residents.

Three stats that matter and one that does not

2011-02-16T22:30:00.005-05:00

Guess which one doesn't matter.

Triangles, squares & corners: Geometry at its finest and possibly the greatest result ever

2011-02-16T21:07:00.001-05:00

No one thought it could be done, but the mighty Barca have fallen! On to the Camp Nou in 20 days.

Money League: See how much the top football clubs make

2011-02-13T22:27:00.001-05:00

Let me start by saying I am a HUGE Arsenal fan. I catch every game that’s on TV here in the States.

If you’re living under a rock and don’t watch football, the knockout stages of the UEFA Champions League begin Tuesday with Arsenal hosting Barcelona on Wednesday in the biggest tie of the round. Catch the game on Fox Soccer Channel at 2:30pm ET. If you want to see the game played at its absolute highest level, this is the game to watch. It will be a beautiful sight.

Annually Deloitte publishes a list of the top 20 football clubs in the world based on revenue. As always, the Guardian Datablog published a viz to go along with its article. They published this absolutely hideous stacked bar chart. Seriously, this is what they published. How do you even know which team is which? There is a fancy mouse-over feature. This stuff kills me!

With Tableau, there are so many better ways to make this data interesting. Here’s my take:

Interacting with the viz you can quickly see that:

The Barclays Premier League dwarfs the other leagues in all revenue types
The Barclays Premier League has seven of the top 20 teams (click on any of the league logos to filter the list of teams)
Real Madrid is a MUCH bigger club than its city neighbor Atletico de Madrid (350% bigger)
Manchester United is also a MUCH bigger club than its city neighbor Manchester City (229% bigger). I hate them both, but Manchester City even more since they think they can buy themselves a title. No chance with an Italian manager; the football is way too negative!
Arsenal dominates matchday revenue, thanks in large part to the spanking new Emirates Stadium (I can’t wait to see it some day). I heard on TV today that they generate $3M every game
The top three clubs in terms of broadcasting revenue are all in Italy. According to the NY Times, “Italian teams negotiate their own television contracts, with the top clubs like Inter Milan, A.C. Milan and Juventus garnering huge deals”, whereas it’s a shared revenue pool in the other leagues. Heck, Real Madrid’s rank in broadcast revenue puts them at 17th, but their overall revenue has them at #1.
German clubs lead the way in commercial revenue. I know virtually nothing about the Bundesliga other than their games are fun to watch and the chanting by the fan is endless

Does anything else stand out to you?

Go you Gooners!

Who owns America’s debt?

2011-02-10T22:57:00.001-05:00

Another great set of data from the Guardian, this time tracking the owners of America’s debt. Probably not a shock to anyone is that America is hugely indebted to Asian countries, China and Japan in particular. As of October 2010, China owns 23% ($907B) of the debt, while Japan is closely behind at 22% ($877B). That’s right, two countries own 45% of America’s debt, a concerning situation indeed.

Simon Rogers of the Guardian posted a visualization using Many Eyes. Once again the viz of choice is bubbles. This time you get a decent idea that three countries account for a huge proportion, but the bubbles are missing the percentage of the total, which in my opinion would give much more perspective. Also, the data provided goes back to July 2008, so why not use all of it? Here is Simon’s viz, but there’s no real need to interact with it; that doesn’t add any value.

Naturally, with country level data being available, I’m led to starting with a map. From there I added:

A bar chart, colored by the amount of debt, to show the rank each country has within its region
A Pareto chart to illustrate which countries have the greatest cumulative influence on America’s financial well-being
A line chart to track the amount of debt owned over time. Initially the line represents the total US debt, but click on a country and you can see how their debt ownership has changed.

Of particular interest is China, since it owns the most debt. It maxed out at $940B in July 2009, decreased its ownership by 10% over the next year, and has since begun purchasing more treasury bonds.

Be sure to look at the UK, which has increased by 450% in just 12 months. I wonder who the sucker is over there.

What do you see?

The Smartphone Wars Could Soon Look Radically Different…if you destroy the pies!

2011-02-04T22:47:00.003-05:00

@furtado tweeted today about an article from Business Insider. The very first line says “The smartphone wars could look a lot different soon…” They then go on to publish these horrific pie charts:

The smartphone wars can indeed look radically different…by obliterating the pie charts and replacing them with bar chart:

With the bar charts, you can much more easily see the variances in the rankings, the sort order is clear and you can quickly see that it goes from six manufacturers to four. I had to count around the pie in their chart, which is much more time consuming.

I’m begging people, please, please, please stop publishing pie charts! You’re taking years off my life.

Mr. Nielsen, a simple bar chart is so much better!

2011-02-03T22:40:00.001-05:00

Another fantastic article from Nielsen, tainted by a pie chart. Want to Increase Store Traffic, Loyalty and Growth? Re-Think the Center Store

The purpose of Nielsen’s pie charts is to compare the % of total trips to the % of total sales. But there’s no way to do it effectively or quickly if your eyes are having to constantly scan back and forth in an attempt to compare their sizes.

Any of the bar/column charts below is a considerable improvement over the pie charts. My favorite of the options below is the bar-in-bar chart. You can quickly see that fill-in/errand trips are the most frequent, but food trips dominate sales. Which is your favorite?

Who will be the all-time Super Bowl ad Champ?

2011-02-03T16:56:00.002-05:00

Vote here (and vote for Coke!): http://bit.ly/f24E61

UPDATED AGENDA: February Atlanta Tableau User Group (ATUG) meeting – February 17th from 1-4p @ Coca-Cola

2011-02-02T20:33:00.002-05:00

The next ATUG meeting will be February 17 @ 1PM ET

Who - All ATUG members and guests

What – The February in person hands on meeting

Where – Coca-Cola - 2 Coca Cola Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30313, learning room 6

Plan to arrive at least 15 minutes early

RSVP – http://events.linkedin.com/February-Atlanta-Tableau-User-Group-ATUG/pub/551737

Agenda:

Demonstration – Grouping & Joining: Tableau vs. Excel (Bryan Hoskins, Athens Regional Medical Center)
Training – Sorting, Grouping & Sets (Bryan Hoskins)
Team project – Are you ready for some football?
Open forum –

March meeting – location, time, agenda
Steering committee changes – who wants to help?

-- This will be a hands on session - Bring your laptop and Tableau with you --