The next Makeover Monday was about countries and the number of holidays they have. The first version shows a nice overview, with each country listed on the x-axis. However, the large number of countries and the fact that the labels are aligned vertically might be overwhelming to the user. Although you can see that the average line is somewhere between 14 and 15, it would be useful to view the exact number. Finally, the visual has grid lines and a color legend positioned at the top right by default, which is an inefficient use of space.
For the new version, I had a different approach and created a petal chart that displays all the countries. First, I added a new field called Path into the data source by pasting
into the data source editor to create a join calculation, where 1 = 1.
Moving on to the sheet, on the data pane, right-click on Path to create a bin and set the size of bins to 1. The following calculated fields are needed prior to building the chart:
And the calculations for rows and columns.
Once the calculations are created, it is time to build the visual.
- Start by changing the Mark type to Line.
- Drag Country on color.
- Put the Path (bin) on one of the shelves and ensure that Show Missing Values is ticked, then drag the pill onto the Path box on the Marks shelf.
- Drag X and Y to columns and rows.
- For both X and Y, right-click -> compute using -> country
- For both X and Y, right-click -> Edit Table Calculation. For Index in Nested Calculations, Compute Using -> Specific Dimensions -> select only Path (bin)
The result should look like this.
All that is left to do is to put the Index on size, do some formatting and adjust the tooltip! The final version also includes a dashboard action that allows you to click on the country from the list to highlight it on the graph.
