Prior to this class, I avoided Google Sheets and Excel like the plague. With Josh’s help, I was able to learn the basics of Google Sheets: how to convert a spreadsheet into a table, how to filter data, and how to create pivot tables. After getting a handle on that, I moved onto Tableau, which is significantly more difficult to learn than Google Sheets. For one of my first projects, a Makeover Monday data story on men’s versus women’s preference for pizza toppings in the UK, these were my first two Tableau visuals:

They are fine, but the top one in particular was just so simple. I wanted to make a more complex visualization, not just a square chart. Josh was my biggest resource while learning Tableau, and he helped me create a more complex visualization than I knew how to make at the time

Although the bar chart isn’t my favorite, the barbell chart was my best visualization for this project. I was struggling to make a horizontal chart that wasn’t a bar chart and would be more legible than one. Josh suggested a barbell chart, and taught me how to place and connect the dots.

However, Tableau was still hard for me to understand at this point in the semester. I wanted to make something unique and interactive, and Josh mentioned that I could also use Illustrator or Figma. That gave me the idea to storyboard a tablet game, inspired by Papa’s Pizzeria, where users learn the data story through playing the game. I still wanted to incorporate Tableau, but Figma was a way to design a project in a way that I understood better. This is the one that will be my summer project! I will also use the summer to practice more with Tableau Public, because I would really like to redesign these visualizations.