Tutorials

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Yesterday, I wrote a tutorial on how to create a static tile grid map in Excel–today, I move onto creating an interactive version. The static tile grid maps are quite nice, but an interactive version would be kind of awesome….

How many times have you heard someone rail against the use of maps in data visualization? The areas are not scaled to the data; geography distorts the patterns; you can’t accurately discern the quantities…. And yet, people love maps. They…

You probably know that I’m a big fan of slope charts. And dot plots. Big fan. Love them both. But neither are default chart types in Excel, which, believe it or not, is still the primary data visualization tool for…