HelpMeViz » Bar Chart

MLB Payroll and Wins

helpmeviz@gmail.com — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 02:09:48 +0000

I want to create a visualization of the correlation between baseball team wins and payroll between 2002 and 2012. My first idea was to do a slope chart with the different payroll values on 2 parallel vertical axis for the two years. I also wanted to visualize the team standings by percent win and how that changed between the two years, i.e how one team had the highest percent win in 2002 and how that value changed in 2012. Given that I had those two values to try to correlate, I opted for a horizontal bar chart that would enable the viewer compare the change between 2002 and 2012 for all the teams, and at the same time could allow visualizing the correlation between that change and the team performance.

The visualization is a clustered bar chart that shows the correlation between the percent change in payroll and performance between 2002 and 2012. There are two bars on the y-axis: the thick light blue one represents the percent change in payroll between 2002 and 2012, and the thin dark bar represents the change in percent wins between 2002 and 2012. The grey and red bars are for negative values

In an iteration to the graph, I rearranged the bars following the winning percentage in the overall League. (Data are here.)

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Urban, Population, Agriculture, and Land

helpmeviz@gmail.com — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 02:09:29 +0000

I’m interested in the relationship between a country’s urban population (as percent of total) and the share of the country’s land in agriculture. In this World Bank data, I wanted to focus on some of the interesting outliers I discovered. For a specific visualization, I wanted to show quantitative and categorical values side by side. I also considered a map and how it might help tell the story. In the end, I created a horizontal bar chart tool in Excel and then transformed them into a back-to-back bar charts using Illustrator. For colors, I highlighted the outlier data with bold colors to stand-out against the other listed countries.

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Part-to-Whole Help

helpmeviz@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 12:42:07 +0000

Reader and contributor Ulrik Willemoes writes in the following request for Excel help.

I am looking for some feedback on a rather basic visualization. I wish to display a parts-to-whole relationship over time. I know stacked bars or areas do not work because of the jiggered baselines, so what are the alternatives? I am doing the visualization in Excel, but I think the general discussion of what would be good practice in this case would be interesting, no matter what tool you use.

The Excel workbook contains a a sample dataset and my three takes on a solution. I have already dismissed Solution A, but could Solutions B or C be useful? What other alternatives might there be?

Thanks for any feedback/thoughts!

PS: I know you’re not supposed to connect categorical data like in solution C, but I think the line does give a sense of the distribution of the categories that is otherwise is missing…

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Plotting Multiple Groups and Multiple Series

helpmeviz@gmail.com — Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:49:37 +0000

This submission comes from a work in progress using restricted data and the user is unsure of how to plot the data. The data consist of three different Groups, each with five different Series. The author wants to look at how the Groups differ relative to the other series, both in the initial starting point (in 2006) and how they change over time. For example, Group 1 starts at a higher level of Series B and the decrease in Series B is much higher for Group 1 than for the other Groups. (Here’s the data.)

The problem is that the author doesn’t like using lines to connect across the Series because he think it leads the reader to think about a time series or a continuous outcome. If he just uses dots then it is harder for the eye to compare across the groups. Bar graphs are probably the best idea, but he wants to show all five Series, which he thinks may be too cluttered.

Another possible way of showing things would be to make a time series (he can generate the values for the other years) but thinks that approach still suffers from wanting to show too many dimensions at the same time.

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Inequality Bar Chart

helpmeviz@gmail.com — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 02:18:32 +0000

This bar chart from Tim Smeeding, Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, compares income distributions in 31 countries for various years using data from the Luxembourg Income Study. The figure shows the relative difference between those at the bottom of the distribution (10th percentile) and those at the top of the income distribution (90th percentile) as well as the ratio between those two points. Because those measures focus on only two points in the distribution, an additional measure of inequality (the Gini coefficient) is presented as well. Are there better ways to show this data?

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