Clearly and Simply

  • Gapminder Replica in Microsoft Excel

    A Gapminder-lookalike animated chart in Microsoft Excel, based on the generic Motion Chart Excel Template

    Gapminder Replica in Microsoft Excel

    The recent article Motion Chart Excel Template provided a generic template for a motion or animation chart in Microsoft Excel. The examples in that post visualized episodes of the Italian cartoon series La Linea (La Linea article on Wikipedia).

    Today’s article will put the motion chart template to a more serious, business like use: a Gapminder replica in Microsoft Excel.

    For those of you who do not know Gapminder: Gapminder is a data visualization software to animate statistics. It was originally developed by Prof. Hans Rosling and his team and Prof. Rosling presented it in this famous TED talk:

    Hans Rosling shows the best stats you have ever seen

    Today’s article rebuilds this data visualization and animation in Microsoft Excel using exactly the same metrics. As always, the Microsoft Excel workbook is provided for free download.

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  • Financial Modeling World Championships 2014

    Invitation to register for ModelOff’s Financial Modeling World Championships 2014

    A guest post by John Persico, Executive Director at ModelOff. As a lead organizer of the event, John invites you to take part in the 2014 Excel Modeling World Championships.ModelOff's Financial Modeling Word Championships 2014

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  • 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

    La Gazzetta dello Sport and Tableau SoftwareIn 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.

    La Gazzetta dello SportFor 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.

  • Motion Chart Excel Template

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

    La Linea #7 - Photographer: Jimmy Fllnk (flickr.com)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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  • Tableau’s Viz as Art Contest – My Entries

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

    Tableau Management Dice Art PortraitsIt 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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