What better way to start a blog about Viz than with a viz to help me make regular updates to hit my goal. One of the many reasons I love Vizology is its ability to make change happen – in this case its meant to make me post content and visuals for you, establish a cadence and see progress.
So I’m going to start with a mini Waffle Chart. This chart shows parts to a whole – like a completion rate, how much of the total is done (or not done). Visuals like this are good for a quick approximation of the progress, not the exact percentage done, and would not be good for comparing two or three things together.
Since I aim for biweekly posts, and ten viz’s this year, that makes an even 36. Thirty-six is a 6 by 6 matrix which is helpful in making a square Wafffle chart. I’ve gone with Tableau for that visual, given its ease of use, the ready availability of a site (Tableau Public) to create, host and share content and its an awesome tool. More on that later.
Below, embedded if all is working, is the first version of the viz. A 6 by 6 grid based on manual dataset, where I tick off if a Blog or Viz as I post in a Google Sheet. I left this in the default Tableau colours for now, where blue is a blog, orange is a viz and grey is yet to come.
You can check the link out by clicking, even download the Viz to see how it works. It’s pretty easy – dataset that includes the rows and column value, and a datapoint beside each. You can take that further with calculated fields, multiple data columns, changing the size to say 10X10 which shows percent completion better. You can pull this off in other tools, a grid on Excel or even a table in a word processor. The idea is to share a visual that imparts a quick sense of progress at a glance.
As for me, the visual is there to keep me motivated to publish and share more. Visit again in a week or so, see what’s new/
Vizology 