Clearly and Simply

Background Image Maps with Tableau

Tableau discovers the world – more detailed maps by using background images and a little trick in Microsoft Excel

Tableau Software offers a very easy way of overlaying data on a map, even without requiring the geographical references (latitude and longitude) in the data source. It automatically identifies field names in your data that are appropriate for visualizations on a map, like state or county and generates the according latitudes and longitudes.

If you are using data of the United States, Tableau provides a very high level of detail (state, county, zip code area) and displays the boundaries and names of the regions on the underlying map. You can even enhance the visualization with a choropleth map showing a variety of predefined US census data.

For other counties of the world, however, Tableau does not (yet?) provide this level of detail. In a data source of Germany, for one, Tableau automatically identifies the 16 states and shows the state boundaries on the map. But that’s it. Higher levels of detail like counties (Regierungsbezirke, Landkreise, etc.) or even zip code areas are not available.

Of course, the folks over at Tableau Software have been smart enough to implement a very easy workaround to overcome this: Tableau provides an option to overlay the data on any given image, e.g. on a picture of a map. Prerequisites for this workaround are a picture of the map and the latitudes and longitudes in the underlying data source. Usually both are easy to find and download somewhere on the Internet. Sometimes, however, the geographical references in your data do not exactly fit to the areas on your map image and Tableau’s visualizations will not be located exactly in the center of the according region.

Today’s post describes this problem using data based on German zip code areas and provides a how-to-tutorial, a Tableau packaged workbook and a little bonus track for my friends in Lithuania.

Bullet Graphs for Excel: A Simple Way?

A guest post by Matt Grams discussing an alternative solution of creating bullet graphs with Microsoft Excel

Preamble:

We proudly present the first guest post here on  Clearly and Simply: Matt Grams describes a very interesting alternative approach of creating bullet graphs in Microsoft Excel without using VBA.

When you need one or more horizontal bullet graphs in an Excel spreadsheet, what do you do if…

1. you work exclusively in Excel 2003 or earlier, 
2. you don’t want to use a 3rd party add-in,
3. you want your spreadsheet to be free of VBA, and
4. your bullet graph must have a professional appearance?

Faced with this scenario of apparently limited options, you’re sure to come across Charley Kyd’s tutorial at ExcelUser. Attempting to build a bullet graph with this method was a useful exercise for me, but the approach left me flustered at the complexity of the data arrangement and chart set-up. If making just one bullet graph was that hard, what are you going to do when you have multiple bullet graphs to implement? Furthermore, not having the bullet graph data values in a single row was far from ideal.

This post describes an alternative and simpler approach of how to create bullet graphs with Microsoft Excel, including step-by-step tutorials and an example workbook for free download.

Export Microsoft Project Tasks to Outlook

Export tasks and milestones from your project plan to Outlook tasks, appointments or notes

Clearly and Simply claims to be a blog on “intelligent data analysis, modeling, simulation and visualization”, and most of the posts are indeed discussing these topics. From time to time, however, I intersperse a post on project management, since project management activities always come along with most of my projects to a greater or lesser extent.

I suppose this might be the case in your professional life as well. A couple of months ago I published a post on how to export a Gantt chart from Microsoft Project to Microsoft PowerPoint. This post was extremely well received by our readers. Thus, I thought publishing another article on how to export from mpp files to other Microsoft Office applications might do no harm.

Today’s post provides a very simple tool to export tasks or milestones from your Microsoft Project plan to Outlook, either as a task, an appointment or a note. As always, including the tool for free download.