Visualizing Katrina's strongest winds

Using the power of R, Dr. Rob Hodges visualized the behaviour of the maximum windspeeds during the Hurricane Katrina. He divided the map in small hexagons and used the maximum values inside to color that section. Here are the comments of Revolutions blog where I found the news (link), and the link to R Studio where is the R Code (link).

Data Visualization: The Great Recession's impact on Wisconsin by The Cap Time

Infographics are becoming a very common way to communicate key ideas and figures. Here is an example of a data visualization of the Great Recession's impact on Wisconsin made by Brandon Raygo in The Cap Time. Here is the link to see the complete infographic.

Visualization: Top 66 Excel Dashboards

If you need to create or improve your dashboards, I consider Chandoo's resources one of the best to get fresh ideas. Chandoo did a dashboard contest one year ago, and was able to collect 66 top quality Excel dashboards that everybody can download. Here is the link to the article. 

Important: Most of the dashboards used VBA macros, so it is an important skills to learn if you plan to work on them.

Stadtbilder: Map the Digital Shape of Cities

Stadtbilder gave us a different way to map population. "While traditional maps show us buildings, roads and physical infrastructure, these maps reveal where and in which form the city is alive." In the example below, the map shows the density of food, nightlife, shopping, and music locations in Hamburg. It is really a cool way to visualize the city dynamics. Here is the link to the website (link).

Data visualization: Mapping Scott Walker's donors by The Cap Times

Do you need to track you  main source of revenue? There is an interesting way to do it using Tableau. Tableau allows us to connect to your database, and create maps and tables updated in real-time. It is also possible to share your dashboards through internet. Here is an example of Scott Walker's donors visualization map published in the Cap Times. Here is the link.

Internet Universe Map

It is one of my favorites map visualizations. It will help you to find the most popular websites in this moment. It uses efficiently size (popularity), color (country), and distance (interdependence) to create clusters.  It is really a beautiful analytical visualization work. Here is the link of the website.

Nanocube: Geo-Located Tweets

How many tweets have been sent in US by type of device? This answer can be found in this link. Although this software is counting more than 200 million tweets, it is really fast generating the maps and calculating the number of tweets by device and specific area. It uses a new more efficient algorithm to process information called nanocube (paper).  

Contour Graph: Unemployment Rate by States

Have you ever had to include the same graph over and over? It is something very common when you have to report. In order to continue giving more insights with the same information it is necessary to look for creative ways to show your work.  A good starting point is to add other dimensions to your graph; these dimensions could be time, levels, geography etc.

One of the most simple two-dimensional graph is the line chart. It gives us trends and one value to focus. If you want to show something new with the same information, and not overload your audiencia you can add other dimensions using other type of graphs.

One good alternative is to use contour graph in Excel. The beauty of this graph is that we get the advantage of a 3-D graph in a 2-D. In this example, we can see in colors how the unemployment rate evolves by state, but also we get a big picture of what is happening in all the country.

Advantages: It is very easy to format, and we can add more levels of colors.
Disadvantages: Difficult to track specific values, in this case it is not possible to differentiate specific ranges by state. An alternative solution is to use horizontal charts.

Here is the link with the Excel.

Four Thousand Years of World History by John B. Sparks

The map shows significant historical events from about 2000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. in a vertical format. Different vertical strips show various peoples and civilizations, with width proportional to influence at the time. Nice way to learn and understand more about our history. 

Link to the high-resolution map.
Here is the link for more interesting maps.

Enhancing Dashboard Interfaces with Shape Layering Tricks by Bacon Bits

Bacon Bits gave us really good ideas how we can improve our Excel dashboards using shape forms. He used a lot of imagination to set up these tables and charts. The same idea could be easily translated to PowerPoint.

Here is the link of the Blog and link of the Excel file.

Visualization of Hurricane Exposure in US

Barry Ritholtz pulled out this graph of Hurricane Exposure by state from Core Logic, June 2013. This picture shows that Florida, Texas, and Illinois have the highest exposure to this natural phenomena. The size and color of the circles represent the amount of the exposure.

Here is the link of the blog.

Excel Apps: Infogram Tool for Creating Charts on Excel

Now we can add to our Excel 2013 beautiful graphs that allow us to communicate better with data. It is an app created by Infogram that does the magic. Here is an example that we can do.

Here is the link to install the app.

Visualize your Email Network

Immersion is another way to visualize your email contacts. The program accesses to your Gmail account, and gives you a visual snapshot of your most frequent contacts. 

I hope Gmail and Outlook can add this new cool tool to have a visual look of our email contacts.

Here is the link: https://immersion.media.mit.edu/
Here is the demo link: https://immersion.media.mit.edu/demo

Visualizing Financial Results: PepsiCo Infographic Quarterly Performance

PepsiCo has begun to publish a quarterly infographic report to investors and analysts. It is a very unusual but effective way to highlight officially its main results to stakeholders. Here is the infographic link: www.pepsicoinfographicq2.com

Data Visualization: Finding the Perfect Assist by KickDex

Nice way to show where the assists originate using data visualization. In his article, KickDex used the Premier League data of the last three seasons to graph where assists started and ended. Here are the results:  

Assists originate:

Assists end:

Here is the link of the article: The 'Perfect' Assist

The Beauty of Data Visualization by David McCandless

Nice video on data visualization made by David McCandless in TED. The key ingredients to data visualization are patience and imagination to make outstanding results.

The World's Biggest Data Breaches

Nice way to present important information of data breaches by the friends of informationisbeautiful.net. They collected all these data since 2004, and organized them in an interactive graph. This graph includes time (axis), number of records stolen (size), and degree of interest (color).

Here is the link.

Excel Geoflow data visualization

Geoflow for Excel 2013 allows us to visualize geographic and temporal data in Excel. It is very simple to use. I created an Excel example with the database of Wal-Mart; I only needed to define the latitude and longitude of each point, and defined what chart to show. Here is a video demo of how easy is to work with Geoflow.

The link of the Excel file is here.

Here is other link how to install Geoflow.

Graphic detail: Charts, maps and infographics by Economist

One of the most interesting web pages in data visualization is the economist.com. We can learn a lot from their articles. Their graphs are always well done, and easy to understand. They are a good model to follow when we have to represent complex data in simple graphs. The right use of colors is one important strength of them; these colors are always consistent and easy to follow. We can replicate many of these graphs in Excel, and do a better job delivering information.

Link: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail
Source: The Economist

Tips on Data Visualization by UNICEF Stories

Data visualization is the last step in communicating effectively our analysis. It requires technical skills, imagination and a lot of patience. UNICEF Stories give us some useful tips when we are working on visualizing data.

Key takeaways:

• Thermometer Charts: To show targets
• Pie Charts: To present divisions
• Heat Map: To show range of change
• Maps: To exhibit spatial information

An important message to remember: "Data visualization is not only about what we see. Data collection, mining, cleaning, validating is very important in creating effective visualizations."

Tips on Data Visualization by UNICEF Stories

Tips, tricks and tools for data visualization — keeping it clean! by Megan Bernstein

Nice article  that advises us how to keep our data clean and perfect before we start analyzing it. Key takeaways: 

• Use Data Wrangler or Open Refine software to clean and make your data workable, and 
• Tabula software for extracting PDF data into a CVS file 

Tips, tricks and tools for data visualisation — keeping it clean! 
By Megan Bernstein