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Category: Visualization

The Problem with Tornado Graphs

Published 2023-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Rita Fainshtein takes a beloved chart and gives it the beating it rightfully deserves:

In the picture above, you can see the execution of the budget on the right (blue), and the budget amount on the left (orange).

This interesting and special graph can be perfectly integrated into any business dashboard.

But does it let you know where the company stands in relation to its budget?

No, it is not. An optimistic view would be challenging, if not misleading.

Click through for more info and alternative ways of displaying this. In fairness, the area where I like seeing tornado charts is a categorical comparison, not a time series comparison, of two things. For example, during a head-to-head matchup in a sporting event, a tornado chart showing relevant stats about each side (or a star player on each side) tends to work reasonably well. Yeah, there are still clearer ways of showing the results in that case, but these have a soft spot in my heart for that specific use case.

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Frames and Tiles in mapBliss (R)

Published 2022-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Benjamin Smith updates an R package:

The mapBliss package is a R package which I developed which allows for users to make custom souvenir quality maps of their flights, road trips and favorite cities by utilizing the power of the leaflet and other R packages (for a full list, see the Github README here). The goal of the package is to imitate the visualization and print-ability of maps produced by businesses like Atlas.co(my original inspiration), TheLittlePen, Mapiful and MaptracksMe (among many other such businesses).

It’s an interesting-looking package.

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Adding Emoji to Power BI Apps

Published 2022-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Hansberry ran out of words:

Your report page names, and in turn, the Power BI app can be enhanced with the judicious use of emoji. I was surprised to find out that the characters came through in full color, and that can help your users find the important pages faster. This can be especially useful in a large Power BI app with dozens of reports and potentially hundreds of pages.

Adding emoji is relatively straight-forward in Windows 10 and 11. Below are the steps for Windows 11.

Read on to learn how to do it with Windows 11, followed by the steps for Windows 10.

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Building Sparklines in Excel

Published 2022-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb tries out a QuickChart feature:

Last week I presented at the Nashville Modern Excel user group and before my session started Will Harvey, the organiser, did a quick run-through of what’s new in the Power Platform. He highlighted a service that piqued my interest called QuickChart which has a new Power Automate connector. QuickChart have an API that you can pass your data to and which will return an image of that data in a chart; they also have a free tier so you can play with it easily. 

Read on for a demonstration, though do note that if you wanted to do it in practice, this is a paid product.

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Coloring Tree Branches in R

Published 2022-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ali Oghabian marks up a tree:

After running Hierarchical clustering we can cut the result binary tree at a certain depth or request that it be cut in a manner that would result a certain number of clusters. Here, I request that the resulted binary tree be cut in away that would result to 2 sample clusters. Furthermore, I convert the resulted tree to a “dendogram” object and colour the branches and the labels of the tree to visualize the 2 clusters. One can use color_branches and color_labels functions to cut and colour the trees.

Read on for a demonstration. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Using the Kusto Time Pivot Chart

Published 2022-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chango Valtchev reminds us of Gantt charts:

This is the scenario: We have a job scheduler and a related job deployment manager, both implemented based on a state machines framework. One of the scheduler features is preemptable jobs: Jobs of that class can be suspended when a high-priority job needs to be scheduled and there is no available capacity. Effecting preemption requires some involved orchestration between the scheduler and the deployment manager, and we’ve had reliability issues in some cases – both due to incorrectly handled races and latency spikes in the cleanup of the suspended jobs from the cluster. Debugging such issues based on the raw logs has been very tedious – a typical log is 10-30K lines. This gets much worse with the number of dependencies. Given the concurrent processing of the suspensions, tracking the interactions with the new job’s deployment can be mentally taxing. The timeline visualization brought a breakthrough to our debugging ability and productivity. The following sample is a purposefully simplified case. In this scenario, things worked well. It shows the ‘Main’ job, at high priority, waiting on its dependencies to be suspended (while waiting, “Skipped schedule processing” is logged). Shortly after all the suspensions complete, the main job gets to Running state.

Read on to see the scenario in action.

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Pre-Attentive Attributes and Visualization

Published 2022-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Velez hits on an important topic:

Have you ever wondered whether the graph or the slide you created is any good? Was the time you spent choosing colors, deleting gridlines, and wordsmithing slide titles, worth it, or for naught? While the answer is certainly more nuanced than a simple yes or no, there is a quick way to gain some insight into this: the where are your eyes drawn? test, also known as WAYED. It’s a simple question, but it can help to refine your own creations, and provides a construct for giving feedback to others.

Click through for the test and a bit more information about pre-attentive attributes.

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Disentangling a Diverging Bar Chart

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Rowe tackles a problem:

Have you ever found yourself looking at a graph for the first time and felt immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information presented?  It can leave you wondering not only how to understand it, but also what decisions led to the creation of such a complex visual in the first place.  

Nobody sets out to make a confusing communication. Most dashboards or visuals start out quite simple…but over time they may be leveraged to do more, provide more info, and support more requirements all at once. After all that, by the time you encounter it for the first time, it’s thoroughly impenetrable.  

Read on for one extreme example of scope creep and how to draw out the most important messages.

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Conditional Formatting from Text in Power BI

Published 2022-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira shows us a trick:

Have you ever wondered if you can apply conditional formatting based on a text field/measure instead of a numeric field/measure?

If your answer is yes, then this trick is for you!

The other day I was working with a customer who asked something that I had no idea how to build.

They wanted to apply conditional formatting over some of their visuals, but they wanted the conditional formatting applied over a text field and not over a numeric field or a measure.

Read on to see how.

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