Sarah DeAtley
information + analysis + design
August 21, 2009 at 10:32 pm
filed under Data Visualization, General
Tagged bentley, data visualization, swivel, tableau, tools
Thanks to those who participated in the poll! I took a 2-week hiatus from writing in the blog because I kind of just got lazy. So there is a tie between writing a post about optimization and data visualization. When my sister found out that her puppy was on the ballot, the puppy faction mysteriously got a lot of votes within 1 hour. She pretty much openly admitted that she voted a few times for Bentley, but on the off chance that someone else voted for Bentley, I’ll dedicate a picture or 2 to him. First, is a comparison of 2 data visualization tools: Tableau and Swivel.
I decided to try Swivel mainly because I could access it without having to download anything, it’s free, and seemed like it had an easy-to-use UI. Those are also the main benefits to using this tool, overall I didn’t think it was a huge step above using Excel. I guess I was expecting more utilization of Flash or interesting visualizations instead of standard charts and graphs because it was in a web environment. Basically you just upload the data, and then you have to “clean it up” so that Swivel can work with the data, and then choose colors and font/pixel sizes. I tried to take out some of the words in my chart so that I could use a readable font size and not have overlap, but now they are overlapping again. They did have a lot of options for embedding and sharing, so that was a plus. Overall it was a “meh” experience. Here’s the final chart that’s supposed to be of Browsers and OS:
Tableau is a software application you can download (I’m using a 2-week free trial), that does cost money. For personal use its a bit pricey, but maybe if all you did for fun was manipulate data into different graphs and charts it would be worth it. I thought they had some interesting visualization options, like heatmaps and text graphs with corresponding color and size variations. For me there was a steep learning curve, and a lot of options for customization that I wasn’t sure would be useful to me. Its a fairly simple drag and drop action to set up the axes, but I found myself performing actions by clicking on things and not really being sure of what I had just done to change the graph. It would have been nice to have a history of actions for people like me who just click on stuff. Still, I wasn’t blown away by the graphical representations in Tableau either. I guess its hard to be impressed by these visualizations when I read about innovations like this.
Tableau Heatmap
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on August 22, 2009 at 11:29 am
[...] post is almost entirely for my sister’s benefit. Because she won the [...]
Results of the Poll: 2-way tie and vote tampering | Adobe Tutorials
on October 22, 2009 at 11:14 am
[...] Thanks to those who participated in the poll! I took a 2-week hiatus from writing in the blog because I kind of just got lazy. So there is a tie between writing a post about optimization and data visualization. When my sister found out that her puppy was on the ballot, the puppy faction mysteriously got a lot of votes within 1 hour. See the original post here: Results of the Poll: 2-way tie and vote tampering [...]