All Visualizations Stories

In 1753, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg took on the non-trivial task of creating a timeline showing the complete history of the world. It was a noble effort, and his final chart came in at a whopping 54 feet (16 meters) wide! Barbeu-Dubourg didn’t have screens, of course. Instead, he had to be creative. He created a mechanical scroller. And believe it or not, his work can teach us a few things.

Our goal is to communicate effectively with data. Software tools provide nice templates for you to show your data. But sometimes the inspiration won’t come from the screen; you're likely to get something better from a piece of paper. If you’re trying to come up with a better way of communicating your insights, step away from the screen and take up the pencil.

How do you know your work is effective? And how can you improve it? One way is to emulate the 17th century coffeehouse patrons who led the age of Enlightenment.

Speed up the time it takes to add custom formatting to your Tableau vizzes by creating a style template workbook.

Having powerful tools can sometimes be a problem. It can encourage us to overcomplicate what should be a simple task. When finding business value in your data, you should be ready to hold back and remember the KISS acronym: Keep it simple, stupid.

Alberto Cairo first began visualizing data in 1997, when there were few books on the subject. “And obviously we didn’t have social media to connect to each other, or even weblogs,” says Alberto, who teaches data visualization at the University of Miami. Alberto is delighted things have changed since. These days, data explorers have a trove of resources to turn to, including each other. In the spirit of community, he recommends these “little gems”—lesser-known worthy reads for data explorers.

What's the best way to compare two categories over time? We'll explore the options in this final post in our UK election series.

Often the raw values are not as important as the actual ranks. This is true in sports, politics, and any instance where final positioning is more important than the actual values. As with all chart types, showing the data in one way means a compromise. A bump chart hides the underlying raw values.

As I read On Writing Well by the late William Zinsser, it struck me that his advice for communicating well with words applies directly to the craft of communicating visually with data. His seven principles in Part I—the transaction, simplicity, clutter, style, the audience, words, and usage—could be written about visualizing data as well.

Throughout May, we’ve been analysing how the media used Twitter in the UK general election. I’m going to do a series of posts on my favourite charts from the project, explaining why they were useful and how they show data in unusual ways.

"The Avengers: Age of Ultron" hits theaters today, and as data geeks, we’re pretty excited to see all the data it generates. Between movie reviews, social media mentions, and box office numbers, tons of data is going to be created this weekend. Of course, data about the Avengers has been available for a long time. After all, Marvel first introduced the superhero team back in 1963! So to celebrate the new release, we rounded up our all-time favorite visualizations about the Marvel universe.

Tableau's features are carefully designed to help people transform data into meaning. The easier it is to express ideas in a calculation language, the more meaning people can generate. Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions allows people to express powerful concepts using simple statements.