Makeover Monday 2025 Week 31 Walkthrough — Minimum Wage Increases
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
Initial Thoughts
- This is a good chart! I’d highly recommend reading through the original article, as it’s an interesting exploration of wages in the region.
- This chart highlights Germany — but I’ll look to see if there’s anything different I want to highlight in the data.
Making over the chart in Tableau
Loading the data into Tableau, two things catch my eye:
- There are multiple entries for most of the years
- There is a column for each country
I’ll figure out how I want to handle the time data later, first thing is I am going to pivot the data and rename my fields so I have something that looks like this:
Also — while the provided dataset says “wages”, I’m labeling it as Minimum Wage so I remember to label it properly in my final published product.
To start I’ll recreate the original step chart — you can change the line type in the path card
Right away we see that it doesn’t match the original — and the time field is to blame. Because we have two entries in most years, the sum isn’t correct. If we change the aggregation to average, it looks like this:
That looks better!
Let’s look at the data a couple different ways.
Putting the results into a heatmap, and coloring on percent difference, I see that Poland sticks out with a jump in 2024.
Going back to the original line chart, if I simplify it down to just 2020 + 2025, I get a nice slope chart. We can see the Poland jump, but all the lines look like a fairly similar slope.
I want to see which countries had the biggest % increase, so I’ll duplicate this slope chart, and change it to a table calc again, percent difference. First it looks like just dots, but if we click the “9 nulls” gray box in the bottom right, and then select “Show data at default position”, we go from this:
To this:
I really like this view — it’s easy to spot that Poland has had a huge increase, followed by Czechia and Germany.
For my finished product, I’ll use both slope charts, as I think together they provide a clearer picture of Poland’s position among their neighbors.
You can crack open my finished dashboard at: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/brrosenau/viz/EuropeanMinimumWage-MakeoverMonday2025W31/EuropeanMinimumWage-MakeoverMonday2025W31
Try your hand at this or other challenges by heading to https://makeovermonday.co.uk/
