Posted by I’ll admit, I’m totally humbled by all the positive feedback on my radial time series chart blog. Honestly, I can’t do any of this without the support and ideas from others in the Community.
Can I add an aside here? I capitalize ‘Community’. Why? Because this Tableau Community means a lot to me and it’s a place. It’s a ‘thing’. And if you haven’t really become a part of it, I invite you to do so.
Okay, back to the post.
So recently I did another radial chart viz for a Makeover Monday data set about Anthony Bourdain. I received a few questions about how I was able to get the dates that didn’t exist in the radial chart.
Okay, don’t freak out. It’s not complicated. In fact, there is a lot of what you may see in fancy Tableau dashboards that is not that complicated. Some visualizations and analyses are DEFINITELY COMPLICATED, but I encourage you to ask the author. You never know if it’s just a quick hack or a deep analytical skill. Either way, you may learn something. So ask away!! *PS you can always tweet or email me, I’m happy to share what I do. Nothing is too fancy. Ain’t nobody got time for that!*
So what did I do? I created another Excel spreadsheet with every date that I knew was in the original data set. Then I joined them together.
This allowed me to have a date for every day during the span of Bourdian’s TV career and maintain data for those dates with an episode. Easy peasy! I told you!
Next, I created my radial chart (see my prior blog post on that) but I used the date field from the ‘full’ date data set in my “Circle Radius” calculation. So my X and Y values use every date (remember for a year–not accounting for leap years–just use 360/365 for your angle).
Then I just created a calculation to make those dates/circles with an actual Air Date larger: IF [Air Date]=[Date] THEN “Show” ELSE “No Show” END. I put that on size and adjusted as necessary and added Region to color.
That’s it! Now if you want more of a challenge, I’m sure there is a way to do with with lots of calcs and just two date fields instead of a table with every day. But I don’t have time for that usually, so creating a quick table was easier. But you can check out Alexander Mou’s post and viz on this technique if you are so inclined!
Enjoy!
Lindsay
Viz Zen Data 