All articles with 'visualization projects' Tag

Game for some charting awesomeness?

Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.

Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?

How about the one above?

Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.

Over on Twitter, I came across this beautiful chart, aptly titled – Joyplot. It is the kind of chart that makes you all curious and awed. So I did what any Excel nerd would do. Recreated it in Excel of course. This post takes you thru the process.

Take a look at final outcome above. Read on to learn more.

Over at Flowing Data, Nathan has published an interesting visualization about spread of obesity.

While the above chart is quite interesting, it doesn’t offer much insight in to the data. There are a few drawbacks,

• Understanding obesity trends for a given state over the years is hard due to the layout and format of the chart.
• Finding which states are experiencing most obesity growth rates is not possible
• Ironically, the chart itself is obese. It takes too much space to explain the data.

Nevertheless, the chart looks cool and can be reused with smaller data-sets (quarterly trends or just for a few years). So let’s recreate the same in Excel. While we are at it, let’s also build an alternative visualization to explore the obesity data.

A few days back, WSJ ran a visualization titled “What’s your pay gap?” It depicts median pay gap between female & male workers in 422 different professions in USA. The chart uses fish eye effect to highlight the selected profession. See below demo to understand the effect.

During last week, an alert reader of our blog, Jørgen emailed me a link to “How Trump happened“.  It is an interactive visualization by Wall Street Journal. Jørgen asked me if we could replicate the visualization in Excel. My response: “Making a new chart in Excel? Hell yeah!”

Read on for awesome visualizations and full explanation.

Just like millions of viewers around the world, I too have been spending hours watching FIFA world cup football matches on TV. I don’t like spending hours watching TV. But when its FIFA world-cup time (which is once every 4 years), I am glued to the idiot box. Blame it on PaWaRa, my school teacher in 8th grade who instilled this passion.

So while watching the match day before yesterday (it was Holland vs. Chile), the commentator said, “This has been a world-cup of late goals” as both teams maintained 0-0 until 77 minute mark when Leroy Fer scored a goal for Holland.

That got me thinking,

Is this really a world-cup of late goals?

But I quickly brushed away the thought to focus on the match.

Later yesterday, I went looking and downloaded all the goal data for 2006, 2010 & 2014 FIFA world-cup matches (2014 data for first 36 matches).

Lets examine the hypothesis “2014 has been a world-cup of late goals”.

Lets talk about people who inspire us. People who show us that anything is possible. People who prove that commitment, hard work and perseverance are true ingredients of a genius.

I am talking about Sachin Tendulkar. Those of you who never heard his name, he is the most prolific cricketer in the world. He is the leading scorer in both tests (15,921 runs) and one day matches (18,426 runs). Read more about him here.

Tendulkar has been an inspiration for me (and millions of others around the world) since I was a kid. The amount of dedication & excellence he has shown constantly motivates me. It is a pity that the great man is retiring from test cricket. He is playing his last test match (200th, most by any person) as I am writing this.

So as a small tribute, I have decided do something for him. Of course, I have never been a cricketer in my life. Once in college I was reluctantly asked to be a stand-by player in a game with seniors. I did not get a chance to pad up though. That is the closest I have been to a cricketer. So I did what I do best. Create an Excel workbook celebrating Sachin’s test career.

Thank you Sachin – his test career in a dashboard

Here is a dashboard I made visualizing his test cricket statistics. It is dynamic, fun & awesome (just like Sachin).

(click on the image to enlarge)

Today lets close some gaps.

Recently I saw this interesting chart on Economist Daily Charts page. This chart is based on World Economic Forum’s survey on how women compare to men in terms of various development parameters. First take a look at the chart prepared by Economist team.

So what are the gaps in this chart?

This chart fails to communicate because,

• All country charts look same, thus making it difficult to spot any deviations.
• We cannot quickly compare one country with another on any particular indicator.
• It does not provide a better context (for eg. how did these countries perform last year?)

But criticizing someone’s work is not awesome. Fixing it and making an even better chart, that has awesome written all over it. So that is what we are going to do. You can see the improved chart above. Click on it to learn how you can create it.

If I need some charting inspiration, I always visit New York Times. Their interactive visualizations are some of the best you can find anywhere. Clear, beautifully crafted and powerful. Long time readers of Chandoo.org knew that I like to learn from visualizations in NY Times & redo them using Excel.

Today let me present you one such chart. This is based on an interactive visualization prepared by NY Times explaining how the tax burden has changed over years for various income groups.

Take a look at tax burden chart – Excel implementation

Read on to learn how to create this chart using Excel.

On 14th July, evening 4:51 PM (GMT), Chandoo.org received its 20,000th comment. 20,000!
The lucky commenter was Ishav Arora, who chimed, “Like super computers…Excel is a super calculator!!!!” in our recent poll.

It took us 8 years & 15 days since the very first comment to get here. And it took just 1 year 7 months & 23 days to add the last 10,000 comments (we had our 10,000th comment on 21st November, 2010).

Out of curiosity, I wanted to understand more about these 20,000 comments. So I downloaded our comment database, dumped it in Excel and start analyzing.

Did I tell you I love tennis? Some of my personal heroes & motivators are tennis players. And as you can guess, I admire Roger Federer. Watching him play inspires me to achieve more. So last night when he lifted Wimbledon trophy for 7th time, I wanted to celebrate the victory too, in my style. So I made an interactive timeline chart in Excel depicting his victory.

Jo (wife) likes to watch Masterchef Australia, a cooking reality show every night. Even though I do not find contestant’s culinary combats comforting, occasionally I just sit and watch. You see, I like food.

The basic premise of the program is who cooks best in given time. To tell people how much time is left, they use a clock that indicates how much time is left (much like a stop clock, with a small twist).

One day, while watching such intense battle, my mind went

It be cool to make such a clock using hmm… Excel?

While I cannot share my snapper (or pretty much any other food item) with you, I can share my Masterchef style Excel clock with you. So behold,

Last week, we learned how to visualize Suicides vs. Murders data using Interactive charts in Excel. William, one of our readers, took this technique and applied it to Stocks. He emailed me because he has some formula issues with the stock data. Once I solved the problem, I asked him, “Can I share this with […]

Over at PTS Blog, my dear friend & charting guru, Jon Peltier has an interesting post on using dot plots to visualize Murders & Suicides data by US States.

Not that murders & suicides fascinate me, but I wanted to play with this data myself and see how we can visualize it. So I emailed Jon and asked him to share the raw data. Being a lovely chap Jon is, he immediately sent me the data. So here we are, playing with gory data on a Friday.

Suicides & Murders by US States – An Interactive Excel Chart

You can see a demo of the chart I came up with above. Read on to learn how this chart is constructed.

I know I am late to the party, but better late than…, uh! forget it.

As the keen readers of our blog knew, I like cricket and I show my enthusiasm by making an excel dashboard (or info-graphic) whenever Indian team reaches a major milestone. So naturally, I was super excited when we won the ICC World cup 2011. Last time Indian won the event was in 1983 and my idea of a dashboard at that time was a bottle of milk and jingo-bell, my favorite shake-to-make-annoying-noise toy. I think our latest world-cup victory deserves something more than that. So here we go.