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Category: Visualization

Choosing a Bar Chart Orientation

Published 2022-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Esselman says to rotate that chart:

Your lesson on choosing an appropriate visual covers a variety of available bar charts. When should I use a horizontal bar chart, and when should I use a vertical bar chart?

When it comes to the horizontal vs. vertical decision, our founder Cole has an admitted penchant for horizontal bar graphs, for a couple of reasons:

Click through for those reasons why bar charts are good but stick around for the reasons why column charts are good. Both have their specific places in the world.

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Page and Bookmark Navigation in Power BI

Published 2022-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kristi Cantor notes a Power BI update:

Hello P3 Adaptive Nation! Happy New Year, ring out the old and ring in the new! Speaking of ringing in the new, with all the hustle and bustle associated with the holiday season and the excitement of welcoming the new year, did anybody happen to notice the new feature quietly rolled out in Power Bi back in November to take the edge off creating and maintaining custom pages and bookmarks? 

Read on to see what has changed.

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The Power BI Icon Map Custom Visual

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Alice Drummond shows off a custom visual in Power BI:

Working across the environmental industry – it’s fair to say that pretty much ALL of DiscoverEI’s Power BI reports have a map! And if you thought that MapBox was good, well you’re going to LOVE the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI – which allows you to display interactive polygons, points, lines and of course – icons, all in the one visual…plus so much more!

We’ve been using the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI for the last couple of years and it’s safe to say that it is hands down our favourite mapping visual for Power BI! This visual is created for free for the community by James Dales. James is always making updates and enhancements to the visual so the best place to get the latest version and some helpful instructions and tips on how to use it is from his dedicated website: https://icon-map.com/index.html. And while you’re there remember to shout James a coffee or 10 to say thanks for creating such a fantastic mapping visual

Click through for a few examples of the visual and be sure to check it out in the link above.

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(Not) Title Casing Graph Titles

Published 2022-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros lays out the argument:

In school, I was taught that you should center-align and capitalize the first letters of words in titles. I’ve noticed, though, that storytelling with data charts only capitalize the first word in the chart title, use ALL CAPS for the axis titles, and don’t center-align anything. Why?

Title casing is a really hard habit for me to break. I understand the “why” behind this, but it’s a change I’m unlikely to make anytime soon.

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Getting Started with Matplotlib

Published 2021-12-23 by Kevin Feasel

David Suarez has a primer on the matplotlib library in Python:

Visualization as a tool takes part of the analysis coming from the data scientist in order to extract conclusions from a dataset. In today’s article, we are going to go through the Matplotlib library. Matplotlib is a third-party library for data visualization. It works well in combination with NumPy, SciPy, and Pandas.

Click through for a tutorial.

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Sparklines and Filter Context

Published 2021-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Hansberry riffs on the new sparkline functionality in Power BI:

This isn’t a tutorial on how to create sparklines as Microsoft has you covered there. What I want to discuss though is how Sparklines are impacted by the filter context in a visual. First though you need to enable this feature. It is in preview mode at launch, so go to File, Options, Options and Settings, and look for the Preview section. Click Sparklines, then close and restart Power BI Desktop.

In the visual above, I added the “Month” field to the Sparkline settings and that created an additional filter on the visual. Before I added the Sparkline, Year was the only filter affecting the numbers. By adding the month to the sparkline, shown below, it breaks out the Total Net Sales figure by month.

But what if I don’t want the sparkline to be the full range of data. For example, I just want the sparkline to show the last 3 months of the year, so 3 data points, not 12.

Click through to see how it’d look as a measure and what you need to do to make sparklines look right.

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Bullet Charts

Published 2021-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Esselman is number one with a bullet:

Our November challenge was inspired by a recent workshop question about bullet graphs. We invited the community to find some data of interest and build their own bullet graph. More than three dozen members tackled this less familiar chart type in a variety of tools, including Excel, Tableau, Python, Illustrator, Datawrapper, PowerBI, and R.

For many challenge participants, this was their first attempt at creating a bullet graph. They discovered, as you may find yourself, that even though bullet graphs are not a typical chart type, they can be powerful in the right situation. 

Click through for examples of bullet charts in action.

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Storytelling with Data Book Review

Published 2021-11-26 by Kevin Feasel

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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