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Category: Visualization

Storytelling with Data Book Review

Camila Henrique has a book review for us:

Hello! As you may have noticed from my Reading List page here, I like to read. Recently, with the new job, I was looking for a book that talked about Data Visualization. While searching, I came across “Storytelling with Data”, and it was not the first time I saw it. After checking a few reviews, I decided to invest my time reading it. Turns out it was a great decision! I liked it so much that I wanted to talk about it here, so here it comes, grab your reading glasses.

This has been on my backlog of books to review, and I agree with Camila that it’s absolutely worth grabbing a copy.

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Re-Making a Line Chart

Alex Velez cleans up a line chart:

When sharing a makeover, typically I’ll show a side-by-side “before” and “after” view. This is a powerful moment for many audiences as they witness the dramatic impact of an effective graph. I share this with you, because until recently if a combination chart was found within my makeovers it represented the “before” state. That’s because most combo charts are hard to read, so I tend to revise them into something simpler—like this makeover.

Today’s article shows the inverse of that process, where, in order to make a visual more informative and easier to understand, I chose to transform the original, a “simple” line chart, into a more “complicated” combination chart. 

This is a good reminder that visuals themselves aren’t necessarily bad (except for the pie chart, which is inherently evil and don’t try to convince me otherwise); it’s all about whether the specific chart makes sense given the story you are trying to tell.

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Graphing Three or More Dimensions

Mike Cisneros takes on a challenge:

When we have three or more dimensions to show, how do you recommend we do it? I worry that my audience might not be able to make sense of it all.

This is a great question. As analysts we are often asked to consider multiple dimensions at once, and investigate complex relationships among these variables. In doing so, we may use visual analyses to explore and find patterns and outliers. The graph types we use to do this tend to be complicated and less intuitive than a simple bar chart or line chart. They might make sense to a trained observer, but to an unfamiliar audience, they’re at best confusing and at worst impenetrable. 

Click through for a few techniques, none of which directly involves 3D graphs, as those are really difficult for humans to understand in most circumstances.

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Voronoi Diagrams with R and x11()

Tomaz Kastrun creates a Voronoi diagram:

Yes. Finally, the Voronoi diagrams with the use of x11() function. This diagram is presentation of a plane that is partitioned every time, a user clicks on the canvas of x11. This plane is partitioned into smaller regions that are close to given set of points.

Partitioning into smaller regions or convex polygons happens in such manner that each polygon contains only one generating point and every point in a given polygon is closer to its generating point than to any other.

I had to take a look out of curiosity, and yes, the x11() function does work on Windows as well.

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Showing Count of Selected Items in a Slicer

Prathy Kamasani wants to track slicer counts:

In one of the projects, I was working on, I received feedback saying it is hard to understand how many items they have selected in a slicer, and it is not the first time I came across this. It is a valid point, especially when you have quite a few items in a slicer, you use a search bar to look for items, you select a couple, but you were not sure how many were selected.

Read on for a rather clever solution to the problem.

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Page Allocation Reports in SSMS

Eitan Blumin has updated an open source project:

Back in April 2020, I created an open-source project called “SQL Server Page Allocation Reports“. It consisted of a set of SQL queries and some Power BI reports that can be used for visualizing the size and locations of your data and transaction log pages.

Well, recently I also added SSMS Custom Reports into the mix. So, it’s time to revisit this project and see what’s new!

Click through to see what’s new.

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De-Cluttering a LIne Chart

Mike Cisneros trims the fat, and there’s a lot of it:

My colleague Alex was the first person I heard refer to the underlying structure of a graph as its “skeleton.” This includes all the features that give form and shape to your graph, but that ideally—like bones—we never even really notice or see. The skeleton frames and structures our graph, but doesn’t include the data itself. 

If we don’t take the time to organize the skeleton of a chart thoughtfully and intentionally, our data won’t be appropriately supported. To an audience, something will always seem a little bit amiss.

Click through for a Halloween-themed visual update.

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Building a D3 Visualization in R

The Jumping Rivers team show how to create a D3 visual in R:

D3.js, or just D3 as it’s more often referred to, is a JavaScript library used for creating interactive data visualisations optimised for the web. D3 stands for Data-Driven Documents. It is commonly used by those who enjoy making creative or otherwise unusual visualisations as it offers you a great deal of freedom as well as options for interactivity such as animated transitions and plot zooming.

Click through for the blog post and also check out the associated GitHub repo. D3 is an incredibly powerful framework, but is almost as complex as it is powerful.

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Emulating Visual Deficiencies with Edge DevTools

Chris Webb shows off a feature in Microsoft Edge:

I’m not an expert on Power BI report accessibility like Meagan Longoria but I do know how important an issue accessibility is. I also know how difficult it can be to remember to check for accessibility issues when building reports which is why, when I was watching this video on new features in Edge DevTools, I was pleased to see that Edge now makes it easy to see how your report looks like when viewed by someone with vision deficiencies.

Click through to see this extension in action.

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