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.