By: Eric Parker
Eric Parker lives in Seattle and has been teaching Tableau and Alteryx since 2014. He's helped thousands of students solve their most pressing problems. If you have a question, feel free to reach out to him directly via email. You can also sign up for a Tableau Office Hour to work with him directly!
I was recently reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio (who founded one of the largest hedge funds in the world). He has an interesting mind and displayed a chart for visualizing data over time series, ranking values against each other. He mentioned that good thinkers are generally able to identify and visualize trends well. His chart looked something like this.
I’m not sure he ever shared an exact scenario, I think he wanted to show one way of visualizing trends over time.
I liked the premise of the chart and began to mull over a circumstance where it might be interesting and helpful. A few criteria came to mind for what I was looking for;
● A repetitive, public-facing process
● A data set where outcomes and trends can change over time
● A (relatively) set number of values in that process
Once I thought of the Olympics as an example, my mind latched onto it. It was the perfect blend for this situation; results every four years, publicly available data, and changes and shifts to results over time.
I found the data I was looking for on www.olympic.org but none of it was to the level of detail I wanted, so I decided to create a table myself by transcribing values.
One of the cool parts about how the data was displayed on the Olympic website is that the results for each year are accompanied by a photo of the athlete for the flag of the country they represented.
Source: https://www.olympic.org/mexico-1968/athletics/100m-men
I was then able to track down the flag icons I needed on flaticon.com and I was off to the races (pun intended).
Here is a screenshot of my final output which you can interact with here.
You are welcome to download that workbook from the link above to reverse-engineer what I did. The steps to build the worksheet in Tableau aren’t that difficult (or probably worth documenting in this post). The most time-consuming parts were transcribing the data and matching the flag of each country to the right shape in the chart.
Here is a screenshot of what the primary worksheet in the dashboard looks like.
I created a custom shape palette, loaded with the flag icons from flaticon.com and then utilized them in a worksheet where the mark type was set as shape.
I loaded some extra fields onto the Tooltip tab in the Marks card as well so you could hover over individual icons and learn more about the contestant and their results.
Here are a few fun facts I learned while working on this project.
● No Jamaican had ever won the men’s 100 meter race in the Olympics before Usain Bolt. He of course won the gold medal three times in a row.
● Some participants from unlikely countries (Cuba, Bulgaria, Barbados) have medaled in the last several decades.
● 1964 appears to be the first year that 8 finalists competed for Gold, Silver and Bronze, whereas in prior years it was typically 6 finalists. This is also why I opted to start my dashboard at 1964 (that and I was tired of transcribing values).
I would encourage you to check out the information available on the Olympics website and try to create something based on your interests! As always, let me know if you have any questions!
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