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Thursday 4 March 2010

Tableau Public, Visualisation Dashboard

Via readwriteweb a top notch blog about web tech, I read about Tableau Public Software Which provide you with free* interactive graphs, maps and dashboards for the web.

This video example about taking public data about graffiti in New York, graphing it, mapping it, finding trends in the data and then showing those trends on the Dashboard. If only we had access to this kind of data in Ireland.

Obligatory Haiti Dashboard Olympic Medals Dashboard

The free service which you download to you desktop gives you 100,000 rows of data, or 50mb which you can upload to its site to view and share.

This is the new manyeyes for me, particularly because it can do maps of Ireland and you can upload and manipulated large tables of data at once.

Im not sure of its geocoding will be useful for Ireland but can use the updgraded batchgeocode.com to get the lat lng and input them directly. Batchgeocode now specifically geocodes for and within Ireland.


Desktop program

You can use excel or csv files. You can make a graph, from one sheet a map from another, then put them together on dashboard, making the filters for them global to get a fuller nuanced picture.

I've tried a few here myself using the data from my TD's Exhibit. It nearly makes it my use of Exhibit defunct. It seems like it had more ways to total, average and display data automatically.

Data at TD google spreadsheet
Constituency editable spreadsheet.
Party editable spreadsheet.

Download these files as xls, strip the { and } from the headers and think of ways of displaying the data.

Need to think of ways to use data to fully utilize this. Figure out how to make the difference in size of icons logarithmic.

2 comments:

Elile Fields said...

Glad you like it, dublinstreams! Note that you can change the size of marks by dragging the slider under the "Size" shelf.

Michael W Cristiani said...

Adding to Elllie's (Hi, Ellie) note about the size of the marks, note that there are three approaches to Size: Automatic, Range, and From Zero. You can find some info in the online help at www.TableauSoftware.com on using each of these approaches. You may want to consider using a calculated field to render the values you are mapping in a log scale. Someone from Tableau will hopefully correct me if this is a loser idea, I hope. In the mean time, have fun.

It would be great to have some metadata on all the fields in your dataset, not just the ones you used in your viz.

MANY BLESSINGS!
Peace and All Good!
Michael W Cristiani
Market Intelligence Group, LLC