Chapter 31 Visualizing Time
Introduction
Of all the dashboards in this book, how many contain a chart showing time? 23 of the 28 scenarios. There are many ways to visualize time, beyond the basic timeline. The method you choose will change the kind of insights that can be found on your dashboards.
Visualizing time correctly is vital to a successful dashboard, and it is the reason why we devote an entire chapter to the topic.
The timeline is an amazing invention. Figure 31.1 shows William Playfair's line chart from 1786. Being amazing doesn't mean it is always the best way to show time on your dashboards. There are many scenarios, discussed in this chapter, where a standard time series actually hides important stories in your data.
Figure 31.1 The first statistical timeline was drawn in 1786. Over 200 years later, we still use similar techniques.
In this chapter, we look at seven different time-based questions and explore the best chart for each one:
- How does today compare with the start of a time period?
- Are there cyclical patterns in my data?
- How can I look up trends across two time dimensions?
- How can I look at rank, not value, over time?
- How can I compare values of things that did not happen at the same time?
- How can I show the duration of an event?
- How can I focus on bottlenecks in a process?
How Much Time Do You Want to See?
What type of data is time?
Most commonly ...
Get The Big Book of Dashboards now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
