#TweakThursday 33: Highlighting Changes

Last week's #MakeoverMonday data set is about top job skills. Two of the vizzes caught my attention. They both used arrows to show the ranking changes in top skills.

One was selected as the Viz of the Day on 4/27/2017. Simple, crisp and elegant design!

The other is by Georgia Chen, selected by Andy Kriebel in his comments of the week.

Between the two, I would say, highlighting changes with color does make a difference in providing values to viewers. With just a little coloring, we show the trend in top skills. Otherwise, it's a little hard to see. Changes are something we are attracted to. Like Andy Kriebel said in his comments, changes give us context.

The author David Krupp did think the changes are important because he included them. Highlighting them would make the viz even more powerful.

Below is my slightly tweaked version based on David's viz, while preserving the original color scheme.

The technique of showing arrows is based on custom number formatting. Check this post out for details.

That's my tweak of the day. Click pictures to see the vizzes.

(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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