Clearly and Simply

Category: Visualization

La Gazzetta dello Sport gives Tableau a try
La Gazzetta dello Sport, the famous Italian sports newspaper uses Tableau Software to visualize 20 years of Italy’s Serie A

In spring this year, I received an email from Marco Nicolucci. Marco stumbled across my Tableau workbook visualizing the history of the English Premier League:

England Premier Football League – Historical Statistics

This workbook already got some exposure from Tableau: it is part of the Tableau Public Gallery, it was mentioned in the wrap-up to the first Tableau Sports Viz Contests (Other Winners from the Sports Viz Contest) and it even made the cut for the 25 of the best Tableau Public Vizzes.

Marco apparently liked my dashboards, too. He asked me, if I could support him to rebuild the Tableau workbook for Italy’s Serie A. So far nothing unusual. From time to time readers contact me with some questions and requests. However, this email was something special and really exciting, because Marco is a sports journalist at La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy’s famous and prestigious daily sports newspaper.

For those of you who do not know La Gazzetta: La Gazzetta dello Sport is not only the Italian sports newspaper with the widest circulation (ca. 450,000 per day on average with a readership in excess of 3 million), but also one of the eldest sports newspapers in the world, first published in 1896. La Gazzetta online according to Alexa is ranked 843 worldwide and 21 in Italy. They have 1.13 million followers on Twitter and 1.5 million likes on Facebook. In Italy, La Gazzetta is more than a newspaper. It’s an institution.

It goes without saying that I was thrilled and honored being asked to become part of this project. In the next few weeks, Marco and I used my Premier League Workbook as a basis and built a comprehensive Tableau workbook to analyze and visualize the last 20 years of Serie A:
- 2 storyboards, 9 dashboards, 32 views
- the classical visualizations like tables, fixtures, goal differences, win-draw-loss chart, etc.
- additional visualizations like a results cross table for one entire season, an all time table (all time = 20 years), a view for one selected team, a comparison of 2 selected teams and a simulation of the 3 points rule versus the old 2 points rule
- various options to slice and dice the visualizations, like home and away table, sorting options, include or exclude points deductions, etc.
Our workbook was published on La Gazzetta online last Tuesday (August 26, 2014):

Serie A, l'era dei 3 punti

It is worlds apart from my original Premier League viz and provides many more options and dashboards. Thus, I thought the Tableau users and football fans among you may be interested in having a look. The dashboards are in Italian, of course, but I think you can easily figure out how it works and what is shown.

So far, the visualization received almost 60,000 views. To put this into context: my Premier League workbook had a little bit more than 31,000 views in three years(!).

Special thanks go to Marco Nicolucci for making me part of this great project. I am proud and honored. Not only that I had a lot of fun during our collaboration, I am feeling I made a new friend. Thank you, Marco!

Stay tuned.
August 29, 2014
Motion Chart Excel Template

A generic template to create Motion Charts in Microsoft Excel and 2 examples to animate La Linea episodes in Excel

A preliminary note

In the previous article I published my three entries for Tableau’s current “Viz as Art” contest.

With pride and humility I announce that one of my entries (my replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 blocks) made the cut and is among the 10 finalists:

Destination Data—Viz as Art contest finalists & voting

The voting is open now through Friday, August 29, 2014, 5pm (PST) and takes place on Twitter. So, if you have a Twitter account, please have a look and vote with a tweet.

To be crystal clear: I am not asking you to necessarily vote for my entry. Have a look, see for yourself and decide which entry you like most. It goes without saying that it is your decision who to vote for, but please do vote. Thank you!

So much for the preliminary note, now on to today’s content:

As mentioned above, I submitted three entries, but truth be told, I had a favorite child: the La Linea workbook. Maybe because it was the only one I haven’t published before, maybe because it reminds me of my childhood, I don’t know.

Anyway. As soon as you have your data, it is very easy to create this animation in Tableau. However, this kind of motion chart is possible in Microsoft Excel, too. So I thought it might be interesting to publish an Excel replica of my La Linea Tableau workbook.

Today’s post provides an Excel version of my La Linea Tableau workbook, a generic template to create motion charts in Excel and also an Excel workbook to animate a whole episode of La Linea. Of course, all workbooks are provided for free download.

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August 23, 2014
Tableau’s Viz as Art Contest – My Entries

A sneak preview of my entries for Tableau’s “Viz as Art” Contest

It is visualization contest time again over at Tableau Software. This time it is a “Vis as Art” contest.

I have published a couple of Tableau workbooks visualizing art here on Clearly and Simply in the last few years:

Tableau Replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 Blocks

6 Famous Paintings in Tableau

Dice Portraits of the Tableau Management

Since I had a little selection to pick from without much extra work, I decided to take part in the contest this time and I submitted three entries: one as it is (replica of Curtis Steiner’s 1,000 blocks), a revised and enhanced one (Tableau Management Dice Portraits) and a new one (La Linea goes Tableau).

I have seen the great quality of the shortlisted entries and the winners of former contests. Therefore I am not pitching my hopes too high, one of my visualizations could make the cut for the 10 best entries which will be published on the Tableau Public Blog. Hence, I thought I’d share my entries with you here.

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August 13, 2014
Drill Up and Down on Choropleth Maps in Excel

Interactive drill up and down geographical hierarchies on a Choropleth Map in Microsoft Excel

The post Faster Choropleth Maps with Microsoft Excel provided a faster version to update a Choropleth Map in Microsoft Excel. The approach made it possible to use Choropleth Maps with several thousand regions on an interactive Microsoft Excel dashboard in production.

This also opened up new possibilities to enhance the maps with additional features. Leonid Koyfman contributed a couple of great enhancements in the follow-up article Fast Choropleth Map with Enhanced Features like filtering the data by value bin, showing tooltips and letting the user decide whether the map shall be colored by state or by county.

Very soon after this follow-up article was published, Leonid came up with another great idea. He suggested to take the user selection of how to color the map to the next level: let the user easily drill up and down the geographical hierarchy by simply clicking on the map. One click toggles from coloring the entire state to the counties in that state and vice versa. I have to admit, I am sitting on this nugget for one and half years already and never found (well, more precisely never took) the time to publish it. But finally the time has come. Here it is.

Today’s article explains Leonid’s idea and implementation how to drill up and down geographical hierarchies on a Microsoft Excel Choropleth Map.

The article includes two example workbooks for free download: the USA by states and counties and Germany by the two common ZIP-code levels PLZ2 and PLZ5 (first two digits of the ZIP-code and the entire five digits ZIP-code).

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June 22, 2014
99 Blog Posts and 1000 Comments

A Celebration Post: Looking back at 99 Blog Posts and 1,000 Comments since this Blog started

This will be an unusual post.

Not only that we had 99 articles since this blog started, we also received the 1,000th comment recently. I am talking about reader comments only, i.e. my replies are not included in this number. A perfect coincidence for a celebration post, isn’t it?

So, no Excel or Tableau tips and techniques today.

Wait! Where are you headed? Hang on.

Be assured that today’s post will not be a simple self-adulation. Well, at least not only. It will – of course – provide some hopefully interesting data analyses and data visualizations, too.

Now, starting point was the question what to analyze and visualize in this celebration post. My first idea was showing some web analytics dashboards. However, I decided to refrain from that because those numbers are embarrassingly low. Instead, today’s dashboards will focus on the content of this blog: both the articles and the comments. And while we’re on it, we will also have a look on my performance: again regarding the posts and the comments.

So please have a look inside. The visualizations are a mixture of “sitemap-like” views (allowing to browse and access all content and comments) and some performance analytics. The dashboards are provided online via Tableau Public, so you you can explore them directly here in your browser, even if you don’t have Tableau installed.

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May 24, 2014