Advanced Training - Formatting: Super PAC Spending with Tableau Public About this data: This dataset is from a MapLight analysis of campaign contributions to Independent Expenditure-Only Committees (Super PACs) from Jan. 1, 2011- Feb. 29, 2012. Contribution data source: Federal Election Commission () Super PAC candidate positions provided by the New York Times ().

Getting Started 1. Open up Tableau Public. Download the viz from this blog post http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2012/07/want-make-your-data-shine-advanced-trainingfriday-1573 2. Click on Download, then Download workbook. (You can download and do this with any tableau public workbook) 3. Navigate to where you saved the workbook and click and drag the workbook onto Tableau Public. You should now be looking at the dashboard called “Before”. In the training, I rename this dashboard to “After” by right clicking and choosing “Rename sheet”. 4. Let’s start by making each of our individual sheets look great.

Overall Spending The politician with the most money wins in 8 out of 10 races. Go to the Overall Spending worksheet and let’s see who has the most overall super PAC support. This data is about US politicians. US politics has standard colors that are associated with different parties. In 99.9% of cases you should use the colors that your viewers will be expecting. 1. Edit the Color by clicking the triangle on the color legend and choosing “Edit Colors”.

2. In the dialog box, click on Romney then click on Red to assign Romney to Red. Hit Ok. 3. It would be nice to make the dollars amounts on the X-axis have a dollar sign in front of them. Right click on Amount and select Field properties and then number format.

1. Select Currency (custom) and change the decimal places to 0 and click OK.

4. Let’s move on to look at Spending by State

Spending by Candidate and State 1. Are some of your pies too small? Whenever you’re trying to figure out how big the size of your marks, there are two things that you want to balance. First, you want to be able to see the smallest marks and second, you want to be able to tell the difference between the different size amounts.

a. 2. Let’s change the size range on our pies. In the size legend, click on the triangle and choose “Edit sizes”.

3. In the dialog box, click on “Automatically” under “Sizes vary” and then select “By Range”

4. Then move the left slider. When you click “Apply” the smaller pies should get bigger. Continue sliding and clicking apply until you’re happy with how your pies are sized. 5. We also want to make the different slices of the pie stand out. One way to do that is to use a border. When you have deep intense colors like the red and blue here. White borders can offer a nice contrast. Click on the word color and choose a white border for your pies.

6. There are also some other options we can choose with a map. We can change the map to have a gray or a dark background. You can also wash out the colors to give your data more prominence. In this case, I like the normal colors with no washout. You can also turn some of the labels on and off. We don’t really need the label for the Country. Our viewers are going to know what they’re looking at. Unclick the “Light Country Borders & Name” box. The map is looking alright. Let’s move on to the table – click on Spending by City.

Spending by City 2. This table is a highlight table. If you’d like to create a highlight table on your own, you can hold down control and select several measures such as “City”, “State” and “Amount” Then use show me to select “highlight table” in the top right corner. (In this case then you will also need to drag Candidate and Super PAC to columns.

Formatting and Finalizing the Dashboard We’ve already got most of the pieces, let’s pull them together into a visual that will fit onto our blog and also make our main points clear instantly. 1. In the lower left, click on “Edit”.

2. 3. Choose “Exactly”, then “Custom” and then type in 550 x 700.

Titles and Layout There are a few things that make vizes stand out. One is that the most important text is the most prominent. It’s in top left, in the biggest font and there is the biggest contrast between the background and the text. And the supporting text is in smaller fonts, it’s below the most important text and there’s less contrast. Another is the use of images. We’re going to add a title that I made in an image editing program. I made my title in Photoshop but there are also a number of free image editing programs out there such as Gimp and Snagit and also microsoft paint. 3. To add an image to your dashboard, select the image object in the lower left drag and drop it to the top of the dashboard.

4. 5. Select “Origins-of-Super-Pac-Money” which you can download from this blog post. http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/blog/2012/07/want-make-your-data-shine-advanced-trainingfriday-1573 6. Resize the title image object by clicking on it and dragging the bottom edge of the object.

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8. Clear away all of the legends on the right. Select each legend and click the “x”. 9. Click on each of the sheets – a gray box highlights the sheet you have selected. Here, “Overall Spending” is selected.

10. 11. Go to the top menu and change from Normal to Entire View. These options help fit your data into the space available on the dashboard.

12. 13. Select Spending by City(you should get a gray box) and choose Fit Width. 14. Add a background color to the dashboard. Select “Dashboard” ”Format” and choose a light green color for the “Dashboard Shading”.

15. In the same menu, change the “Shading” under “Dashboard Subtitles” to a slightly darker green (or any other color you’d like). 16. To Change the color on Overall Spending, right click on the white space in that worksheet (area highlighted in yellow) and choose “Format”.

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18. Click on the paint bucket.

19. Choose a light green color for the worksheet shading.

20. Now click on the paint brush.

21. Use the drop-down menus to add grey grid lines. Normally I choose very light grey grid lines. For the purpose of training I’m going to do darker ones so I can be sure that everyone can see them. You may

have noticed that there are three tabs. The Sheet, Rows and Columns tabs.

22. We just added both horizontal and vertical gridlines.

23. Do you know how to get vertical gridlines only? Hint: You were editing the sheet, you’ll need to think rows and columns.

24. In Overall Spending, right click on “Candidate” and choose “Hide Field Labels for Rows”. 25. Right click on “Candidate / Super PAC and choose “Hide field Labels for Columns”. 26. One more thing. Our axis for overal spending should be in $M. Right click on the x-axis which shows Amount and choose Format. 27. Then use the drop-down menu under “Numbers” to change the decimal places to 0 and to change the units to millions.

1. Save to the web by clicking File->Save to Web as 2. Publish 3. That is all!