Buzzfeed recently asked Midjourney to draw images of people in 50 US states. So the AI drawing tool created 50 images of couples that represent its perception of the people in each state.
I just put the images into a tiled map in Tableau. Each image is added as a background in each tile.
The folks at Business Expert had a brilliant idea. They asked AI's perception on UK banks as a dog. I am inspired to do the same on US banks.
ChatGPT is asked to confess its perceptions on top US banks as a dog. Then Midjourney is tasked to generate the images. Check out what dog is matched to your favorite bank.
All are put together into a single-sheet Tableau dashboard. Feel free to check it out.
Through my previous post on the new Sankey chart type, I got in touch with Wilson, the product manager leading the development of this new chart type. I made some comments on creating multi-level Sankey via cascading of single Sankey's. He told me it can be done already by dropping more dimensions into the Level card. How could I overlook that functionality when exploring? Maybe it's because there are only two level bars in the Level card icon? Or did I have a fixation on building multi-level Sankey via a Lego approach?
Oh well, I am really happy that we can build multi-level Sankey charts with a few drag and drops!
Below are a few varieties of multi-level Sankey chart built with the new chart type.
As an enthusiastic user of Sankey charts, I am excited to learn that a Sankey chart type is being piloted in Tableau Public (Web Edit only). I wrote about Sankey chart design in multiple posts. Sankey chart may appear in different forms depending on applications.
I played a little with it just to evaluate it. Here are my initial findings and comments.
I can quickly create a Sankey with 2 dimensions and 1 measure. This is great!
I noticed that two new marks cards are being used: Level and Link. The two dimensions are placed in Level card and the one measure is placed in Link card.
Comments:
- The text labels are showing by default and not editable. I understand the design choice. More details can be put in the tooltips. Note that the measure is showing in percentage and not the measure itself. That's fine in Sankey. But I hope we can format the percentage. Currently we can't.
- The Label card is no longer the same as in other chart types. The labels have option to show on links/branches that are selected or highlighted or both.
- The Color card provides options to a number of color palettes. We as user can't assign color to each member of a dimension. It's pretty rigid. The coloring of the links follows that of the left level/dimension with a lower opacity. I wonder if we should have option to use the colors of either left or right level/dimension for those of the links.
Comment:
In the process of creating a dashboard on the US Travel Advisory 2023, I found some mismatches in a few regions in two countries.
One is Gaza Strip in Palestinian Territories. In the latter, there are two regions: Gaza Strip and West Bank. However in Tableau's map, the corresponding polygon to Gaza Strip doesn't show up. I later found out that the region is named "Palestinian Territories" which is the same as the country. So the pair country/province is like "Palestinian Territories/Palestinian Territories". This gives me the correct polygon for Gaza Strip. I noticed that Gaza is a city within Gaza Strip and also the name of cities in multiple countries.
I expected the correct pairing is "Palestinian Territories/Gaza Strip". I checked openstreet map whose map is used in Tableau. In that map, the region is called Gaza Strip.
Mexico City as the capital is like Washington DC and is regarded as a state in Mexico. In mapping Mexico at the state level, I found that Mexico City is not showing up. After some research, I found that I need to use "Distrito Federal" for it to show up. In Britannica, it is stated that Mexico City is officially equivalent to the "Distrito Federal".
I expected that Mexico City or CDMX work as well as Distrito Federal. It seems that CDMX is replacing Distrito Federal as the official name of the capital.
I hope the above can be fixed to reduce the confusion by Tableau users.
Below's the US Department of State's Travel Advisories visualized in Tableau. The interactive version is here. It's dated on 3/14/2023. This is a dynamic map which needs to be updated all the time. Please refer to the US Department site for the latest.
This is a follow up post to Fiscal Calendar Calculations Cheatsheet for Tableau.
Excel is a very important tool for data analysis and calculations. It's also an important data repository for Tableau. Some of the calculations can be made in Excel before the data is loaded into Tableau or other tools.
So here we are going to show the conversion from a regular date to a week-based financial calendar date, via Excel formula. We still use Apple's 5-4-4 Fiscal Calendar as an example.
It is the week that includes October 1st which is an Anchor Date. From the first week, we can determine the Fiscal Year.
The formula can be simplified a little: (E2-WEEKDAY(E2)-(D2-WEEKDAY(D2))/7
Week-based calendars are used in many companies as their fiscal calendars. The total weeks in a fiscal year is 52 weeks, that is, 364 days. Each quarter has 13 weeks. There are 3 varieties of 13 weeks: 5-4-4, 4-5-4 and 4-4-5 weeks per quarter. In leap years, there are 53 weeks or 371 days. IRS has created special code for the 52-53-week fiscal years.
Each company's week-based fiscal calendar will differ in 4 ways:
Apple's Fiscal Calendar is widely disseminated on the web. Here we try to clarify some of the misunderstandings and provide calculation assistance in Tableau for analyzing time series based on the 5-4-4 format. We will use Apple's fiscal calendar as an example below.
In a common year, it's a 52-week year which has 52x7 = 364 days.
A year has 4 quarters and each quarter has 3 fiscal periods/months.
Each quarter has 13 weeks.
At Apple, the first period of a quarter has 5 weeks and the other two have 4 weeks each. It's thus called a 5-4-4 calendar.
For a week-based calendar, it is very important to understand the definition of its first week. Each company may have a different definition of the first week.
For Apple's fiscal calendar, its first week is the one that always includes October 1st. This week is the first one of the next fiscal year. For example, the week that includes 10/1/2022 is the first week of fiscal year 2023.
In Apple's fiscal calendar it's always a Sunday. There may be other conventions where we need to change the following calculations.
Every 6 years or so, there will be a leap fiscal year.
A leap fiscal year will have 53 weeks, one more week than the common fiscal year.
The cause of the leap fiscal year is as follows:
- A common fiscal year has 364 days while a common calendar year has 365 days. It is 1 day less than the calendar year. It seems that every 7 years, we need to add a week to the common fiscal year to realign the starting dates of fiscal years. But the 7-year frequency is broken by the leap calendar years because a calendar year doesn't always have 365 days. This makes it a lot less predictable when guessing which year is a leap year.
- A calendar year has its own leap year which has 366 days. This happens on every 4 years on the years divisible by 4 and excluding the years that can be divided by 100 but can't be divided by 400.
In a leap fiscal year, there will be an extra week or a leap week. Where to place it depends on the company. In Apple's fiscal calendar, it's added in the third fiscal month which becomes a 5-week month during a leap fiscal year. That is, we insert the leap week after the 13th week of the fiscal year. Or the 14th week of a leap fiscal year is the leap week.
We have an extra week in a leap fiscal year. It is appended to the end of the first fiscal quarter or the 3rd fiscal month/period. Thus, the first fiscal quarter, instead of 5-4-4 quarter and having 13 weeks, it becomes 5-4-5 quarter and having 14 weeks.
This is easy. Just find out if October 1st in two consecutive years has a gap of 53 or 52 weeks. If 53 weeks, it is a leap year for sure. So, use this logical formula:
The Sunday of the first week is the first day of the fiscal year.
In Tableau formula, we can easily derive the first day of a fiscal year. For example for the fiscal year 2023, the first day is:
DATETRUNC('week', MAKEDATE(FiscYear-1,10,1))
DATETRUNC('week', MAKEDATE(FiscYear,10,1))-1
- What fiscal week is it in? We got FiscWeek which is dependent on Order Date and FiscYear.
- What fiscal month (period) is it in? We got FiscMonth which is dependent on FiscWeek and Leap Year T|F. (Credit Steve Fenn)
- What fiscal quarter is it in? We got FiscQuarter which is dependent on FiscMonth.
Note that each company may have its own way of defining its week-based fiscal calendar. Hope that this post can give you some ideas for deriving your own specific formula.
Feel free to download this workbook and copy over the formula if you wish. Contact @aleksoft if questions.
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