A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Laura Ellis walks us through the Patchwork package in R:
As is the focus of this post, when this package was shared on twitter, people were very excited about it. The patchwork package was created by Thomas Lin Pedersen. Not only is it incredibly easy to use, it comes with great documentation
Once you have your plots built, aligning them is rather easy.
Comments closedYifan Cao, Hossein Falaki, and Cyirelle Simeone announce something cool:
We are excited to announce that you can now develop and test Shiny applications in Databricks! Inside the RStudio Server hosted on Databricks clusters, you can now import the Shiny package and interactively develop Shiny applications. Once completed, you can publish the Shiny application to an external hosting service, while continuing to leverage Databricks to access data securely and at scale.
That’s really cool. Databricks dashboards are nice for simple stuff, but when you really need visualization power, having Shiny available is great.
Comments closedReza Rad has fun with dynamic binning in Power BI:
In the previous article/video, I explained how to create dynamic bins by choosing the count of bins in a slicer in the Power BI report. In this article, I’ll explain, how you can do it the other way around, which is by selecting the size of the bin, you will have bins and buckets dynamically generated.
I like this for its ability to let you select the proper number and size of bins when Power BI is being particularly obstinate about something. In an ideal world, I don’t like this so much as a user-facing feature because we as designers should know the proper number and size of bins.
Comments closedStephanie Evergreen shows various ways to visualize ratings data:
Stacked Bars *seem* like a good idea – we show 100%, we can fit more questions and data into a similar amount of space – advantages, right? Except that stacked bars are difficult for people to read. How well can you compare the values of the orange segments? Not so much.
If you are going to use stacked bars, make some helpful formatting tweaks, like smarter color coding and an order from greatest to least.
A lot of this comes down to simplification and reduction of possibilities. Read the whole thing.
Comments closedElizabeth Ricks tries the impossible:
A friend called me recently and started our conversation with: “I know you dislike pie charts, but…can you help me create one?”
Spoiler alert: I don’t hate pie charts. They’ve received a bad rap over the years and with good reason—they are very commonly used when another chart type would be better suited. The appropriate use case for a pie chart is expressing a part-to-whole relationship. Their limitation is that it can be difficult to accurately judge the relative size of and compare the segments. Here are some related articles on our blog: the great pie debate and an updated post on pies.
Elizabeth does put together the best possible case, but I’m still in favor of burning pie charts to the ground.
Comments closedTeo Lachev shows us how to build a Power BI report book:
Scenario: Management has requested an easy way to view a subset of strategic reports located in different Power BI workspaces. You can ask the users to mark reports and dashboards as favorites so they can access pertinent content in the Favorites menu, but you’re looking for an easier configuration, such as to create a book of reports with a built-in navigation that organizes reports in groups (like a table of contents), such as the screenshot below demonstrates.
Click through for the instructions as well as a discussion on why you wouldn’t necessarily want to build a Power BI app for this.
Comments closedAlex Velez takes us through the humble bar chart:
Our eyes start at the base and scan towards the end of each bar. We measure the lengths relative to both the baseline and the other bars, so it’s a straightforward process to identify the smallest or the largest bar. We can also see the negative space between varying heights of bars to compare the incremental difference between them.
Not only are these graphs easy to read, but they are also widely recognized. Chances are, you’ve already encountered a standard horizontal or vertical bar chart. But bars come in many shapes and sizes. I’ll list below a few of the most common variations, with links to examples.
Click through for some good information on bar charts, including design tips.
Comments closedAndreas Neudecker shows off a new package:
We have been developing shiny apps for quite some years now. A problem we stumbled upon multiple times in this process was, that there is no easy approach to define matrices in shiny. So we had to help ourselves with workarounds.
Not anymore. Now you can plop a matrix right onto your Shiny app. And the package is on CRAN.
Comments closedInge Christoffer Olsen shows how to clean up tables in R for publication:
The summary of Adverse Events is a nice table just summing up the adverse events in the trial. Note the “[N] n (%)”-format which is the number of events, number of patients with events and percentage of patients with event.
This particular example is about adverse events, but the key concepts in the code apply to many kinds of tables you want to make look a bit nicer. H/T R-Bloggers
Comments closedJeroen Ooms walks us through some audio analysis with R and the av package:
The latest version of the rOpenSci av package includes some useful new tools for working with audio data. We have added functions for reading, cutting, converting, transforming, and plotting audio data in any popular audio / video format (mp3, mkv, aac, etc).
The functionality can either be used by itself, or to prepare audio data for further analysis in R using other packages. We hope this clears an important hurdle to use R for research on speech, music, and whale mating calls.
One of the most interesting things I saw Edward Tufte demonstrate was visualizing music using the Music Animation Machine. There’s a lot of space here to experiment. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closed