Data visualisation exercises

Go to datawrapper.de - you don’t have to sign up for an account, but it’s useful if you want to keep using it (for free) to create charts easily. Then, pick a dataset from below and experiment with different ways you can visualise it. The datasets are all ‘clean’ but you may want to delete columns to make it easier.

Contents

• Datasets
• How to use datawrapper
• Hints

Datasets

Some datasets to try out:

• Prescription data (top 10 prescriptions in England, from 2006 to 2016)

  Download CSV

• Help to Buy data (Wales, by quarter)

  Download CSV

• Gender pay gap data (number of companies by median gap)

  Download CSV

• Industry in Wales, by area

  Download CSV

• Risk of flooding data (Wales, by region and local authority)

  Download CSV

Note: You can also use the datasets that Datawrapper has to see what works and doesn’t work.

How to use datawrapper

1. Download a dataset above
2. Import the file into DataWrapper from your computer as shown and click ‘proceed’:

1. Check that the data looks how you’re expecting and there’s no red in the table (as shown), then click ‘proceed’:

1. Choose the chart type that you think will work well for this data
2. Check the ‘refine’ button because that gives you a lot more options for changing how the chart looks, and the chart will update as you play around. You can change colours etc here.
3. Look at ‘annotate’ - this lets you add text like a title, subtitle, etc, like so:

1. Note you can also check that it’s okay for colour-blind people to tell the difference between line colours…

1. Click publish and embed, and you’re done. You can also just take a screenshot of it, which is what I do!

Hints:

• If the chart isn’t working, have you tried transposing the data?
• What relationship are you trying to show? What’s the best way of showing it?
• Have a look at the FT’s Visual Vocabulary to get some inspiration! Not every chart here is available on Datawrapper though.