Hello, and welcome to another edition of Viz Talk Live.
Today we’re going to look at Ben Jones’ winning sports contest entry and go over how
this viz was made.
First off, congratulations again to Ben for his win.
He visualized sports droughts across North American professional sports teams,
including which franchises have gone the longest without a championship, as well as which cities
have been waiting the longest for a sports championship of any kind.
We’ve also got a map that shows whether or not cities have ever won a championship
and how long since their last win.
There’s three main views here, each with their one interesting point to pay attention
to.
So let’s rebuild this viz, starting with a new sheet, and let’s use Show Me.
First, let’s visualize the drought by each team.
We know that we want to view Team, League and Number of Seasons Without a Championship,
so we’ll select those.
Show Me recommends a bar chart, so let’s go with that.
We don’t really care about this Null value, so we can click on it and exclude it.
Let’s also reorganize the bars, we don’t want to break apart our teams by their league,
so we’ll switch the order just by dragging League over to the right.
Sort the teams, and now we’ll color the bars by whether or not they’ve ever won
a champion by dragging this to Color.
There are two last formatting things we can do.
Ben had the number of seasons actually labeled at the end, and we can do that easily by dragging
Seasons Without a Championship to the Label shelf.
If you also want to remove these lines like Ben did, open the Format menu and choose ‘Borders’,
and then under ‘Row Divider’, set Pane and Header to None.
Next, let’s do the map.
Double-click on ‘City’ to have Tableau populate the map with every city in our data
set.
However, right now, we’re giving each city a dot on our map, but it’s entirely possible
for one city to have multiple teams, such as Chicago.
So we need to add Team to the Level of Detail shelf, to tell Tableau to break it apart even
further.
Now, we want to color and size each of these marks, so we’ll put Seasons onto Size, and
Ever Won onto Color.
In general, we always recommend setting some transparency on your marks particularly when
they overlap like this.
If you want Ben’s grey map, just choose it from the Map Options drop-down menu.
Now, for the last view.
This one is a little tricky, and you’ll see why.
We want to showcase each city and how long they’ve gone without a championship, regardless
of team or whether or not they’ve ever won.
Right now, however, we’re showing how many total seasons they’ve gone without a championship
for each team and summing them up.
This is because our data, correctly so, goes down all the way into each team, and doesn’t
stop at each city.
What we need is some data that shows, for each city, how long they’ve gone without
a championship, not each team.
Ben has this data, you may have seen this other data set in our window, and he combined
it with the original data set with a cool trick called data blending.
Let’s give it a shot.
This time, let’s bring out Metropolitan Area.
It’s identical to City, but you’ll see why we’re going to use it instead.
Now, when I select the 2nd data set, you’ll see that Metropolitan Area has a link symbol
next to it.
This means Tableau recognizes there is a data field that links the two datasets, and now
we can blend information together between them.
So let’s go ahead and now visualize Seasons Without Winning, and color the bar by Ever
Won.
This is exactly what we want to see.
Again, feel free to add Seasons back to the Label shelf if you want the number to be listed.
Now, throw all the sheets onto a dashboard.
The last thing we’ll want to do is add some quick filters, and we can do that easily by
selecting the sheet that has the field we want to filter by, in this case, seasons without
wins by team, and then selecting the caret, quick filters, and then the field we want.
Let’s go with Team.
You can change the filter style by clicking on the caret in the filter and selecting a
filter type.
Ben went with a drop-down menu.
Because we’re working with a pre-made workbook, the filter is already set to be global and
affect the whole dashboard.
If we need to change this, just choose Make Local from the filter-menu.
We can do the same thing for a League filter if we wanted.
And that’s how Ben made his winning viz.
You can find his live viz in the description below, where you can download it and try making
it yourself which we highly encourage you to do.
Do you have a viz for Viz Talk?
Whether it’s something you would like us to discuss or have us walk through how to
build?
Send it to us, at social@tableausoftware.com.