Coloring does make a difference, big or small depending on cases.

I noticed Yang Yu of Shanghai made a great viz and won Viz of the Day a couple of days ago. It required a lot of work to get the data set pulled from Open Street Map. It looks like this:
This is the Tableau rendition of Geoff Boeing's original research
https://geoffboeing.com/2019/09/urban-street-network-orientation/

I found it a bit monotonic. So I decided to add color to it. Then, I found that among the 4 quadrants, the other 3 are almost the rotated replica of the first one. Thus we just need to color the first quadrant. There are 9 equal-size slices per quadrant, one per 10 degree. So we only need a palette of 9 colors for the coloring. In my design, I assigned 9 colors in a color spectrum sequential order.

Here is the result:

Besides being very colorful, the most revealing thing is, I see cities having the same street orientations. Two big cities in Australia, both Melbourne and Sidney have the similar street orientation. Is this a miracle, or they have the same urban planner? Manhattan is alone in its street orientations which is unusual.

Other insights include that most US cities are well urban planned.

Color does help a lot in identifying patterns of similar orientations.

Feel free to download my workbook.

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(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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