Your data doesn’t stand still… why should your dashboards? Check out these creative techniques for visualizing data – all available with just a click in Tableau 8!

5Creative Ways to Display Data In 2013

Tree/Bar Combo The bar chart – as classic as a grilled cheese! But what would grilled cheese be without tomato soup? As you can see this viz allows us to compare relative sizes, just like a bar chart, but it also uses a tree map inside the bars to show us more detail. We can see from the bars that Barack Obama raised more money in total. But the colorful tree map shows us the other half of the story: Romney’s average donation was much higher.

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Bubble Charts Bubble charts are a beautiful way to display comparative information and are especially useful when broken up by a category, as you see here. This viz shows average campaign donations by occupation. Those with averages less than $250 or totals less than $10,000 are filtered out. Clearly, the attorneys went with Obama and the bankers went with Romney! They only have “Vice President” in common.

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Infographic Style Often, displaying data is about telling a story. Ideally it would be easy to add images, annotations, legends, labels and links to your own stories where appropriate. In Tableau 8, you can create dashboards that allow you to place any object on top of your viz (even another viz!). The result? A clear and concise story that tells itself.

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Unit Charts Unit charts are a simple way of displaying the relative number or hierarchy of items. Basically, you use colored icons (in this case circles) to show how many of something belong to a category or order. In this viz, we are looking at the fastest cars in the world. They are arranged from fastest to “slowest” from top left to bottom right, with the color of the circle representing their 0-60 time and grouping them with cars of similar speed.

Word Cloud You’re right! In most cases there are better ways to display data than a word cloud. For example, they are not fantastic for comparing relative sizes or amounts. But, word clouds can be an excellent way to show the frequency of different words or events. Here you can see words in tweets during the week of #TCC12 - and Beer Week. Beer Week seems to have won this race… we’ll console ourselves with a porter!

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