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