#TweakThursday 14: Dotting The Map

This Monday's Viz of the Day (8/22/2016) is about malaria in Africa. This topic is dear to me in two ways:

- Last year in 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was given to Ms.Youyou Tu of China for discovering artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, which saved millions of lives. She got her inspirations from Chinese medicine. Being a native of China, I am very proud of her. Here is her Wikipedia article.

- Recently Tableau Foundation launched a project for helping Africa combatting malaria. I have joined the project and helped mapping some of the African villages. Also, I introduced a few kids to volunteer for the project.

The viz in question is simple and elegant. It has got all of the 47 countries in Africa on the map. But if anyone can find them all on the map, I would be very surprised. The problem, as Zen Master Andy Kriebel once pointed out, is that the countries are of irregular shapes and sizes on the map. The smaller countries are at a disadvantage because users are less likely to see them or to find them at all.

The tweak here is to add a dot to each country, big or small. So tiny countries like Comoros, Swaziland, Gambia and Cabo Verde are surfaced. People can easily point and click them to view stats. The original viz's layout and tone remain unchanged.

The dots are added through dual axis. Click image to go to the interactive version. The data is updated to 2000-2018 based on WHO report.

BTW, this viz is part of the #MakeoverMonday project.

(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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