Last week, Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan posted a tile grid map to Twitter. Because he tagged me in the tweet, I thought he had used my Excel template. Instead, he built a script in Stata that creates a…
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Bump Charts may not be the most common type of chart, but they are useful for plotting changes in rank. Consider, for example, political polling or winning percentage in sports; it’s the rank that’s particularly important, not the actual percentage….
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As a reader of this blog, you probably know I use Microsoft Excel for a lot of my data visualization needs. Excel is easy to use, everyone has it, and it works well with most other programs. One of the…
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The Eurosearch Song Contest, a new visualization from Maarten Lambrechts and the Google News Lab, examines what would happen if Google searches were used to award points in the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s a really cool piece that allows you…
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Someone recently asked me how to create a legend for a heatmap in Excel. In R, adding a legend is part of the package (the image below from a thread on StackOverflow), so it’s pretty easy to do. Building a…
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I saw this interesting post from Len Kiefer yesterday about creating a Pixel map of the U.S. using R (which he based off this blog post by Colin Fay). While tile grid maps and hexagon maps address some of the issues…
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Choosing and implementing color palettes is a difficult task in visualizing data. Color can be used to highlight and draw attention, but also to confuse. It can be used to make things seem drab or to make them “pop”. As…
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I’ve never been a big VBA coder in Excel, but I’ve always wanted to be a big VBA coder in Excel. It would certainly save me a lot of time, but, well, yeah, I just haven’t learned. Until now! Over…
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In a recent article about the political geography in Scotland, The Guardian created a tile grid map, but instead of inserting text in the grid, they inserted Sankey diagrams. It was an interesting approach, and Alberto Cairo remarked that, “I…
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This is a guest post from David Napoli, a BI & Analytics Director (and recovering rocket scientist) who has worked as lead actuary, statistician, and headed up analytics departments for several healthcare organizations over the last 20 years. In a…
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