SAS 9.2 is a big leap forward in many areas. One of them is a variety of new graph types and easy access to creation in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2. I think these two charts offer a fascinating look at the 2008 Presidential Election Results using SAS Maps and Tile Charts from the upcoming book, “SAS for Dummies”, updated for SAS 9.2 and available for purchase this Spring!
One of my favorite new examples added to the 9.2 edition of the book shows the 2008 presidential election results in two views: a map of the US with the winner by % margin of victory and a tile chart showing the state size, the winner and their % margin of victory. Due to the black and white nature of the book, these are shown in grayscale in the book and here on the blog.
2008 Presidential Election Results on a Map, Winner by State with Margin of Victory
Number 5
Do your New Year’s resolutions have you wondering where your money goes? Here’s a snapshot of the average American and their spending habits How the average American spends their income
Number 2
A shocker at number 2 since this post is several years old, a testament to the popularity of SAS and the power of SAS Enterprise Guide, The Joy of SAS Enterprise Guide
Number 1
And, the top blog post with props to Ellie Fields and Chris Stolte at Tableau for their strong editorial review and support, a 100 year dashboard of S&P stock returns and the historic investing environment S&P Composite Stock Market Returns Dashboard
Wishing all of you a happy, successful 2010! Thanks to our many customers and readers for all of your support! Finally, a special thanks to all of our friends at Tableau Software and SAS!
Learn the hottest visual analysis tool and impress your friends, your professors, your drinking buddies and even your family with incredible visual analytics from Tableau! From great data presentations to data exploration to dashboards that wow your class, get all the features of Tableau Professional edition for $69 for 6 months or $99 for 12 months.
This workbook is an example of spotlighting in Tableau. Spotlighting involves applying user rules about data values to spot certain outcomes. With Tableau it is simple to apply basic to complex rules for spotlighting. This is beyond the standard highlighting capabilities available by placing measures on the color shelf.
As this example demonstrates, fairly complex rules can be used in Tableau to control spotlighting in simple calculated fields. Comments appear on the captions in each view (bottom of each view area in the Tableau workbook.)
Announcing the availability of our first Tableau Training location in 2010- sunny, warm Orlando, FL! Topics include visual analysis for presentation, data exploration and dashboard design. Tableau Certification is also available. Read the details and find other upcoming locations in 2010 at http://www.Freakalytics.com/training.
Freakalytics also works with many leading organizations to present our highly-rated training on-site, see http://www.freakalytics.com/consulting. On-site training is a great value for teams of 5 or more people seeking to make the most of their investment in Tableau Software in short order!
Implement and practice these seven habits to make your work relevant, timely and actionable for the business and your customers!
Collect, discuss and understand the questions that matter for your customers and business owners. Working with the business, determine how valuable the various questions are and whether they can be acted upon. How much time should be spent on this work? Is it better to take a simple approach and deliver a rapid answer and then revisit it more in-depth? Remember that the first step is the most important step! If you don’t actively engage in this step, you will lose a lot of your time and opportunity to positively impact the business.
Collect and clean the best available data for the identified questions. Implement a strategy to capture and enrich the analytic data used across multiple projects.
Explore the data sources to understand high level trends and exceptions. Leverage rapid graphs and simpler analytic methods here…
Understand key interactions, trends, sources of effect & possible causes. Use clear graphs in a simple, short presentation to explain key findings for business owners.
Communicate the right amount of information and conclusions in the language of the audience. What matters to them? Don’t be afraid to make recommendations based on your work! Don’t be offended if they don’t follow all of your recommendations, there are many factors beyond your findings that will affect what is implemented. When creating your presentation, apply the 10/20/30 rule of Guy Kawasaki- no more than 10 slides in 20 minutes and no text smaller than 30 point font!
Collaborate with the business to act on the findings. Seek long-term business opportunities to seamlessly integrate analytics.
Continue to learn from and listen to the business! The more you listen to the business the more they will listen to you!
As you practice these habits, especially step 1, you will eliminate one of the biggest complaints I hear from analysts- that their work isn’t appreciated or understood often enough in the business. Step 1 is about active listening, understanding context of problems and prioritization. Unfortunately, most analysts and statistical experts have never received any training in this area!
At Freakalytics, we are pleased to offer custom training for your technical and analytic teams. Using a series of short workshops, we can coach your team to better understand, practice and gain confidence in applying these habits. Please contact us for more details.
The chart in the original article at Visual Economics is indeed attractive. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to understand. Key data relationships that should jump off of the chart are obscured by the donut chart and excessive chart text or “chart junk”.
Here are several accessible and simple ways to present this fascinating data. All of these examples were created with Tableau.
Reviews of “Rapid Graphs with Tableau”
“A great work – this is going to be a much loved book.” Marc Rueter- Director of Sales Consulting, Tableau Software
“A must read for anyone interested in Tableau. Clear explanations, practical advice and beautiful examples…” Elissa Fink – Vice President of Marketing, Tableau Software
Back Cover Text
Tired of boring spreadsheets and data overload from confusing graphs? Master the art of rapid graphs with Tableau Software. Tableau is designed with one goal in mind – to give you the power to quickly explore and understand your data so that you can use your results in a wide variety of real-world situations. After learning Tableau, you will be able to clearly communicate your findings with audience-friendly graphs and tables.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a common saying that is more relevant today than ever as volumes of data multiply and the need for easy access to answers becomes more critical. From simple yet stunning graphs to vibrant multi-graph views capable of communicating incredible insights, this book will cover the extensive range of Tableau capabilities in easy-to-follow examples. Learn the scope and flexibility of this powerful application in just 15 days and go beyond the traditional limits of data presentation!
Stephen’s latest book is a brilliant interplay of simple to advanced statistical concepts with powerful visual equivalents and methods. It offers wonderful guidance with great examples around visualizing time series, correlations and multivariate analysis problems. It will have a major impact for many years to come in changing how business analysts work, think and improve their companies!
A friend of mine recently asked “… are statisticians becoming irrelevant” (hey, that’s me!) with the advent of advanced visualization tools like Tableau. I think the answer is yes and no. New tools like Tableau combined with methods expounded by Stephen will allow daily business questions to be answered rapidly. This should allow the statisticians to focus on tackling very high value problems where even a 1% improvement in the outcome is a huge win.
I have personally found that combining my work in data mining with beautiful stories about the results (created with Tableau) is truly impressive and informative for guiding decision-makers. Business decision-makers gain the advantages offered by advanced data mining algorithms such as decision trees, logistic regression and neural networks to identify primary predictive patterns and variables. The analyst can then clearly explain the results with compelling visuals to easily convey the findings and recommendations.
I think Stephen’s latest book will become the “gold” standard for data exploration books to follow. If you need the next step past “Show Me the Numbers“, this is it! BTW- it is even better than “Show Me the Numbers“, which is indeed very impressive. I plan to incorporate some of this book into my advanced Tableau course, “Data Exploration and Elegant Dashboards with Tableau”.
Economic Indicators and S&P Composite Returns from 1901-2008 A Dashboard to Explore Past, Present and Future Results by Year
When creating a dashboard, two critical questions to ask include, “what are the right metrics” and “what collection of graphs will optimize exploration and understanding from a complex relationship between multiple metrics”? This example uses historic economic and stock market data to explore these concepts and to provide powerful insights into stock market patterns relative to economic conditions. This interactive dashboard is powered by tableau public, a new service of Tableau Software. One means of interacting with this dashboard is data point brushing, highlight data in a part of the dashboard by single-clicking and dragging your mouse across data points of interest.
” Selecting the right metrics can be difficult but is a vital step to improve insight. Frequently, tradition dictates which metrics people are accustomed to receiving for a particular subject. However, these metrics could leave out vital pieces of information making the standard metrics potentially misleading. For example, many stock market discussions ignore or minimize the impact of inflation on historic returns. To understand the stock market over extended time periods, inflation can severely skew interpretation as inflation has varied widely over the past 100 years in the US.
After reading several articles, I decided to add my help for wayward singles seeking the right city to call home. Following in the footsteps of work in the New York Times and Sperling’s BestPlaces, I seek to create a visually intuitive presentation about the “best” place to be single. In particular, I seek to find the best cities based on concentration of singles and offer insights about cities with better odds for women and men- with some surprising results!
I hope this is a fun topic for everyone and a useful reference for some!
I love exploring the possible intersections of technology and information, with the intent to improve or expedite knowledge sharing.
One of my recent epiphanies was related to the difficulty of efficiently reviewing resumes, especially technical resumes. Recruiters and managers spend huge amounts of time reviewing resumes (at least they used too) and automated tools have attempted to “mine” resumes to simplify the review process.
Effectively Communicating Survey Data: Beyond Text Tables and Pie Charts
A review of an article from Investor’s Business Daily and recommended improvements is covered in this presentation. The topic of the article is “Obama Terrorism Grade”, a summary of a survey conducted in early April, 2009 by Technometrica Market Intelligence.
The Results are summarized three ways in the article:
- Overall for all respondents
- By political party
- By ideology
Two presentation methods are used:
- Pie chart
- Two text tables
Weaknesses of the chosen presentation method are covered and recommended improvements are shown.
To all you long-time users of SAS out there, why are you continuing to write the arcane code required to make graphs with SAS programming? I remember the pain of scanning the nearly 1,000 pages of GRAPH manuals to locate just the right options to tweak my graphs for business presentations. Many days, I wanted to ditch it all and just fall back to Harvard Graphics for all of my graphs (yes, this was quite some time ago!) Consider using SAS Enterprise Guide and save yourself many sleepless nights and get the easy ability to export to Office seamlessly.
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