Red vs. Blue – 35 Cool Visualizations on 2008 US Presidential Election

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With 2008 US Presidential elections around the corner everyone is busy including chart makers. There are hundreds of excellent visualizations on the presidential election campaign, speeches, issues, predictions that keeping track of what is best can be a tough task. We at PHD have compiled a list of 35 totally awesome visualizations on the 2008 election. Do check these to get more insights in to this election.

The visualizations are grouped in to these categories:

  • Campaigns & Speeches
  • Projections
  • Primaries & Caucuses
  • Other Politics
  • Trivia & Fun Facts

Like this list? Browse other cool visualizations here.

Visualizations on Campaigns & Speeches

Article References to Obama & McCain

How many articles are referring to Obama and McCain

Donations Made to Political Candidates

Donations received by each candidate. The blue semi-circles in the center describe the size of the overall donations by both Obama and McCain. The lines indicate the amount of donation made.

Anatomy of Speech – Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech at DNC

Presentation Zen takes a look at Obama’s acceptance speech at DNC and compares it with a symphony.

Wordtree – Obama Speaks at DNC

Obama’s speech, the word “WE” in a word tree.

Sarah Palin in VP Debates – Wordle Tag Cloud

Look at what Palin spoke in the VP debates recently, in a word cloud. More Wordle clouds : McCain, Obama @ DNC, Obama vs. King – the speeches I have a Dream vs. More Perfect Union

Marginal Taxes – Obama vs. McCain

How each candidates taxation policies effects the marginal taxes.

Campaign Finances – Breakup

Break up of campaign finance information by NY Times.

Tax Plans – McCain vs. Obama

How the tax plans of Obama and McCain are going to impact you?

Campaign Finances – Breakup

Campaign finances information visualization by BBC

Ad Spending

This info-graphic shows which candidate is spending how much in each state in advertising. Looks like Obama beat McCain hands down in most states as far as ad spending is concerned.

Candidate Visits to Each State

This visualization by CNN shows us how many times each candidate has visited each of the 50 states since the campaign has began. You can see that swing states have attracted unusually large amounts visits compared pre-decided states.

Issues and Agendas, What is their Stance?

This stacked chart shows how much each candidate has given preference to the various issues like health care, taxation etc.

Visualizations on 2008 US Presidential Elections – Projections & Polls

Vote Prediction Tracker – US Electoral College

Intrade – 2008 Electoral Projections

2008 Election Projections

Pollster – View & Analyze Polls

Perspctv – another Election Tracking Site

Presidential Watch – what various websites are saying

The Economist’s pole – Economists prefer Obama over McCain

NYTimes – Poll Tracker

Gallup poll tracker…

Google Maps Projections Tracker

Cartogram of Projections

Primaries & Caucuses

Who names who – Debates leading to Iowa Caucuses

This interactive visualization takes a look at the speeches made during primaries and caucuses and tells us who is naming who.

How they voted in primaries ? – Clinton vs. Obama

This brilliant visualization provides very good analysis of how people voted in democratic primaries.

Visualizations on Trivia & Fun Facts

The Measure of a President – NY Times

The height and weight of presidential candidates since the 1896.

Obama vs. McCain – Google Search Insights

Who is searched more? Obama or McCain, now you can find it with Google Search Insights

Compare Political Quotes – Google Labs

Compare quotations made by candidates on various issues.

Red vs. Blue – Popularity of Books – Amazon

Amazon plots their book sales data to show which states are reading what wrt. political orientation.

Presidential Demographics

This interactive chart shows the life of each president and when he became the White house inhabitant. A fun way to look at who got the opportunity very early and who waited long.

Amazon Halloween Mask Sales – Obama vs. McCain

Can Halloween mask sales predict who is going to be next president. Amazon has built a meter for us to track who is selling more masks – Obama or McCain. Looks like Obama is leading here.

Party Head Quarters

Want to findout more about party head quarters in each city / state? This google maps application is perfect for trivia mongers.

Visualizations on Other Politics

who voted No to the $ 700 Bn Bailout Plan

The NY Times interactive graphic tells the story behind the initial NO vote for the $ 700 Bn bailout package.

How republican and democratic senators voted in 2007

Another look at how both republicans and democrats voted in 2007, you can see why McCain calls him self a maverick. He is the only one not connected to the republican network.

National Debt by Political Party

This graph shows US National Debt by in years since 1975. The bars are colored based on the ruling political party at that time.

Bonus Visualizations – For Fun

Palinworld – New Yorker coverpage

A humorous take by New Yorker on how Palin Sees the world form her home

What your vote helps determine – PHD Comics

PHD Comics takes a look at the irony of what each vote determines.

So which one(s) do you like better?

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23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”

  1. sam says:

    Its possible to display up to 4 text values.

    Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !

    http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6

  2. ruve1k says:

    With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.

  3. soumya says:

    Hey,
    Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating  text? 

  4. [...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]

  5. […] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]

  6. Jon Gali says:

    There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
    First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:

    Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.

    Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.

    It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.

    hope helps.

    Regards,

    Jon

  7. Linda says:

    Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.

  8. Danzi says:

    Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:

    "Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."

  9. Hiren says:

    pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
    NAME PAN AMOUNT
    MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
    MR.Y AAABR1258C
    MR.A CFVDE2458T
    MR.Z AAVCR12548C
    MR.X AAAAC1254T
    MR.Z AADCD245T

  10. Hiren says:

    pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
    NAME PAN AMOUNT
    MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
    MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
    MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
    MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
    MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
    MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
    how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.

  11. Letitgo says:

    I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.

    I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.

    The formula looks like that:
    =IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))

    Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.

    As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format

    Additional trick:
    In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.

    1-A
    2-B
    4-C
    8-D

    yields :

    5 - AC
    14 - BCD

  12. Tushar says:

    Hi
    I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??

  13. Tushar says:

    Hello Guys, Need your help
    I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
    I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
    Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
    I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.

    BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
    A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)

    Next Sheet
    BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
    A1 14/5/2014
    a2 23/5/2016
    A1 12/5/2014
    A1 13/6/2014

    From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy

    TIA

  14. […] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]

  15. Kyrene says:

    This is great thank you.

  16. Rabiul says:

    Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.

  17. I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.

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