#TweakThursday 5: Formatting Running Total Chart

Today's Viz of the Day on 6/27/2016 is about the deaths in Game of the Thrones. Here is the link to the blog. Lots of context-based graphics made the viz really special and cool. Just love it. The author David Murphy did a lot of research and kept numbers of kills in book, an effort that I can only admire.

In the viz, there is a chart about the cumulative sum of kills since Season 1. I found a few things to tweak.
- The headers are not legible and some are wrapped around.
- Gridlines and column bands are redundant.
- The coloring scheme is redundant

Here are the tweaks I did:
- Changed header and episode names to be short
- The column bands are sufficient in distinguishing the seasons. Gridlines are unnecessary.
- The height of the bars are indicative of the quantity of the kills. Further coloring is not needed.
- Added kills per episode. This gives viewers a better idea on the distribution of the kills.

The resulting chart is:
That's all. The workbook can be downloaded here.

(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button.

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

Go to the target dashboard
Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager
Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest.
Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.
The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help.

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Vizible Difference

In search of data visualization excellence

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

2. Create an show/hide button

3. Add annotations

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