Clearly and Simply

  • Bruce Springsteen Discography in Excel

    A Microsoft Excel Replica of the Tableau Infographic on Bruce Springsteen’s Discography

    Bruce Springsteen at the Austin Music Awards - Photographer: Charlie Llewellin (flickr.com)The recent post presented a Tableau Infographic on the Discography of Bruce Springsteen’s Studio Albums.

    Tableau apparently liked my Infographic and selected it as the Viz of the Day for June 25, 2013 and even incorporated it in the Tableau Public Gallery. I am feeling honored. Thanks, folks!

    I originally planned to directly continue with a follow-up post about how to create and when to use Word Clouds in Tableau.

    On second thought I decided to postpone this follow-up article. I haven’t published anything for more than 6 months and I had a strong feeling I should quickly do something for those of you primarily interested in Microsoft Excel.

    So, if you are waiting for the article on Word Clouds in Tableau, please bear with me. The post will come soon.

    Those of you interested in Excel: this is for you. What would have been more obvious than publishing a replica of the Bruce Springsteen Discography in Microsoft Excel? It goes without saying that the Excel workbook mimics the most interesting interactive features of the Tableau original. As always the article provides the Excel workbook for free download.

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  • Bruce Springsteen Discography – An Infographic

    A Tableau Infographic – The Discography of Bruce Springsteen’s Studio Albums

    Bruce Springsteen live in Munich 2009 - Photographer: Lord_Henry (flickr.com)After six months without any new blog posts (please accept my apologies) I felt totally out of practice. Hence, I thought starting with a fun post and an infographic would make my comeback to blogging easier than an article on a more serious data analysis or data visualization topic.

    4 weeks ago I received an email from a guy (pen name: Chorizo Garbanzo) who runs together with 2 friends a music blog and podcast called Trust The Wizards.

    Chorizo stumbled across a post I have written back in November 2010: Wordle Tag Clouds in Microsoft Excel, where I used the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen songs to demonstrate how to embed Wordle in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Chorizo took the lyrics out of this workbook and created a blog post showing screenshots of Wordle Clouds for a selection of Springsteen albums: Trust The Wizards – Bruce Springsteen Lyric Art.

    Chorizo’s post and the fact that Tableau Software included Word Clouds in version 8 gave me the idea for today’s article: I completed the lyrics in my Excel workbook, added some additional information on the albums and created an interactive infographic on Bruce Springsteen’s Discography (studio albums only) in Tableau 8.

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  • Build Network Graphs in Tableau

    Visualize Relationships, Connections and Associations in Networks with Tableau Software

    Network Graph TableauClearly and Simply proudly presents a new guest article: Michael Martin of Business Information Arts, Tableau Partner, Tableau Certified Consultant and leader of the Toronto Tableau User Group shows us how to visualize Network Graphs using Tableau Software. Enjoy.

    Network Graphs can help us see and measure relationships and connections between people, places, and things over time. This can be expressed as identifying, measuring and understanding process flows, the mix of products in shopping carts, social network and email traffic, affinities and interests people share (or don’t share), and the “hierarchies of influence” in business and / or social systems by identifying who or what triggers events, and the impacts they have on others.

    Today’s post describes how you can build Network Graphs using Tableau Software versions 6 or 7, including a detailed how-to tutorial and some information on the background of Network Theory.

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  • Create Excel Choropleth Maps from Shape Files

    How to transform Shape Files into Microsoft Excel Choropleth Maps – including 2 Maps of Germany by Zip Codes

    Germany by Zip CodesOn several occasions I thought (and stated) that I already published everything I have to say about Choropleth Maps with Excel.

    Having said that, it seems as if “the ghosts I called I can’t get rid of now”. Recently someone asked me if I could provide an Excel Choropleth Map of Germany by zip codes. Careless and stupid boy I am, I answered “sure this is no problem”. What a misjudgment.

    If you followed my previous Excel Choropleth Map articles, you know that it takes either an Enhanced Metafile of the map you can ungroup in Excel to get the shapes or at least an SVG file to transform it to an EMF file using e.g. Inkscape. 

    And here is the roadblock I encountered: I simply couldn’t find a map of Germany by zip codes in one of the required formats. All I could find were ESRI shape files. After hours of searching for EMF and SVG files, I gave up, simply reversed my thinking and looked for a tool to convert shape files into SVG. 5 minutes later I had the solution.

    Today’s post describes how to use Indiemapper, a free online tool, to transform shape files into SVG which can then be used for Microsoft Excel Choropleth Maps in the well-known way.

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  • Interactive Tooltip Examples

    3 Examples of how to use an ActiveX Spreadsheet Control as a Tooltip on a Microsoft Excel Worksheet

    Prova Riporti - Photographer il Vanzo - tiny little pieces (flickr.com)The recent post described how to use an ActiveX Spreadsheet Control as a tooltip on Excel worksheets. At first sight this seemed to be a nifty little idea to spice up tooltips on Microsoft Excel worksheets. In the meantime, however, I had to learn that there is a major pitfall:

    The heart of the solution, the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control is part of the so called Office Web Components. So far, so good. The problem is that Microsoft does not ship the Office Web Components with Office 2007 and later anymore. In other words, in a clean, new Office 2007/2010 installation, the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control is not available anymore.

    Microsoft still provides the Office Web Components for free download (Office 2003 Add-in: Office Web Components), but there is still a major drawback: if you want to use the described technique, you have to make sure that every user of your workbook either uses Excel 2003 or has the Office Web Components installed.

    At the end of the previous post I announced a follow up article with more practical examples using the technique. Knowing now what I didn’t know before, I pondered if this article would still make sense. To cut a long story short, I finally decided to publish it despite the limitation described above. Maybe some of you will still find it interesting and useful.

    Today’s post provides 3 different use cases of how to take advantage of the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control in a tooltip:

    • a scrollable tooltip
    • side calculations within a tooltip
    • an improved version of the Summary Card tooltip

    As always the articles provides all Excel workbooks for free download.

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