Makeover Monday 2024 Week 5— Cost of Studying in Europe
Makeover Monday is a weekly project where participants improve how they visualize and analyze data — one chart at a time.
Here’s my thought process working through this week’s challenge.
The original chart
My thoughts on the map:
- European Geography is not my strongest suit — Country labels would help.
- I have to keep glancing from the map to legend to try and guess the total yearly cost, and a lot of countries look a similar shade to me. Is it cheaper to study in Poland or Hungary? It’s hard to tell.
Making over the chart in Tableau
I’d like to try my hand at a hex map — I’ve done one for the USA but never Europe. I really like the look of one of Neil Richard’s latest maps, I want to see if I can emulate the minimalist look.
After far too much googling, I couldn’t find the raw excel file for the tile map* that I was looking for, so we’ll go a different route.
I’ll steal like an artist from Neil again, this time using his Bank Holiday map. First step is downloading the workbook from Tableau Public.
On the hex sheet, Right click the data source, export to CSV, Migrated Data, and save. Then you can load the data source up in a new workbook.
Now time to connect the Makeover Monday dataset. I’ve chosen to add country codes to the provided data set, and have that be the basis of the relationship so that I don’t worry about spelling differences between the country names on the files.
Now time to make the map. Drag Hex Col to columns, Hex Row to rows, and Country to detail. Note — to get the map to display in the correct orienation, you’ll need to reverse the axis for Hex Row.
Also shapes! If you haven’t already, you’ll need to add a hexagon shape to your Tableau Shapes repository. I found a hexagon from The Noun Project. You can read more about adding custom shapes to Tableau here: https://www.tableau.com/drive/custom-shapes.
I’ve added total cost to color, and country code + cost to label. My problem is that at the higher cost levels, the black text is impossible to read.
To compensate for this, I’ll follow the technique outlined here: https://kb.tableau.com/articles/HowTo/how-to-display-text-labels-in-different-colors-according-to-conditions.
After custom labels and formatting, the finished version looks like this:
What do you think? Is it more effective than the original?
Try your hand at this or other challenges by heading to https://makeovermonday.co.uk/
*Note: if you have the blog post / link to original hex map (not a rectangular tile map) file, let me know! I’ll update the blog post so people can spend less time googling than I did.
